


if only i could, i'd make a deal with god and i'd get him to swap our places

by warsfeil



Category: Fruits Basket
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Child Abuse, F/M, Masturbation, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:07:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 35,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27480934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warsfeil/pseuds/warsfeil
Summary: Akito Sohma was heralded as the birth of the long-missing God of the zodiac.Instead, she was born as the cat.
Relationships: Kuramae Mine/Sohma Ayame, Sohma Akito/Sohma Shigure
Comments: 35
Kudos: 51





	1. Chapter 1

Akito doesn’t run. 

She watches the sunrise from the engawa, wrapped up in an oversize haori and huddled in on herself against the wooden support of the wall. The air is cool on her cheeks as the pink stretches across the sky, illuminating even her small world. The morning breeze picks up and brushes against the dew of the night, and Akito listens to the sounds of the estate waking up around her. 

Kureno comes for her, and Kureno alone. 

“It’s time,” Kureno says. He holds a hand out to her, and Akito takes it, holds onto it. Within the confines of her own room, with the light of dawn around her, she steps forward, buries her face into Kureno’s shirt. His arms go around her, but it’s a loose grip: even he won’t hold tight, not when the end is so soon. Not when Akito is something he can’t hold on to.

“Is there anything you need?” Kureno asks, when Akito steps away, and she looks at the sky again.

“No,” she says. She pulls the haori tighter around her. Akito owns little and cares about even less, and the few things of sentimental value that she’d managed to keep hidden she’s carefully given out to the few people she trusts. She steps out of her room, and Kureno follows her; he transitions to being at her side as they leave through the front door. He puts a hand on her elbow, steadying and warm, and it’s as much to support her as it is to make it look like he’s the ever-attentive jailkeeper. 

Whispers, as ever, follow her. They’re quieter now than they were before. There’s a quiet across the entirety of the main house, at odds with the rest of the estate. Outside, there are families waking up, making breakfast, discussing recent graduations and plans for the future. There are alarm clocks and rice cookers and school uniforms and all the things that Akito has never known. Inside, though, the weight of the curse bears down heavy on all the inhabitants, and there is no one left to mourn Akito. Her existence has been a dark cloud for too long, and the whispers are quiet and elated that the largest problem of the Sohma family is finally going to be gone.

_We’re rid of you_ , their eyes say. The maids with their carefully pressed kimono stop what they’re doing to watch as she walks past, their mouths pressed into thin lines. _We’re all finally free._

Akito doesn’t see any of the juunishi. She wonders if Ren sent them away, specifically; she wonders if there was anyone that even wanted to say goodbye. She thinks of them all and feels her heart clench, and so she keeps thinking of it, imagines each of them over and over again until her heartbeat evens back out. She can’t be weak, not anymore. She can’t let that happen. 

Akito walks under her own power, with whatever shreds of dignity she has left, but she doesn’t know if she would be able to stand so tall if Kureno wasn’t there. He doesn’t look at her, and she only glances at him out of her peripheral vision. Will he be alright? Will any of them? 

If she’s gone, will they finally be alright?

The head maid is waiting when they arrive, and Akito doesn’t spare her a single glance. She’s only there as a precaution: to guarantee that the thing they all hate the most is safely disposed of. Akito steps into the house, her feet bare against the cold wood floor, and thinks, for a wild second, about running.

She doesn’t. Akito doesn’t run.

She turns back to Kureno, leans up and places a hand on his chest.

“You’re free now,” Akito says, so softly that she can’t be overheard by anyone else. Better to let them think she’s pleading for something, that she’s making her last argument for freedom. “So fly.” 

Then she steps inside. She doesn’t look back until she hears the sound of the lock finally turning, and then she lets the breath out of her lungs and crumples back against the heavy wood of the door to the Cat’s Room.

-

As it turns out, the word “room” is something of a misnomer, which Akito realizes once she trusts herself to stand. It’s still very barebones -- even by Sohma standards -- but given that it’s meant to house her for the rest of her life, she supposes some amount of comfort was required. She has a futon and enough blankets to get her through the colder parts of winter; there’s a chest in the corner with familiar kimono in it, flat colors and sturdy fabric. She has a bathroom, even if the tub isn’t large enough to spread out in, and a single window that she can see the sky out of.

“That’s all, huh,” Akito says, to herself. She traces her hand around the rooms, but there’s no dust to be seen. Everything is carefully kept. She wonders who had to clean up before she arrived. She wonders what it looked like. 

A part of her had imagined it differently: that there would be scratches on the wall or steel and concrete to lock her in. There are bars, certainly, slicing what would be the main room into two sections like anyone would want to visit her -- but she could break out, if she wanted to. The window is just glass and the house is just wood, and Akito could break free.

She doesn’t, of course. She slides down against the wall and watches the clouds move through the narrow view the window provides. It’s peaceful, in a way. Her entire life leading up to one fixed point, and now that she’s passed it, there’s simply nothing left. There’s nothing left in her.

Akito counts, for a moment: there’s only ten, eleven more years until even the youngest of the juunishi will be adults. She needs to stay alive that long. She thinks she could die here, in a place like this. She knows the punishment is meant to take her entire life, but how long is that, really? She’s always been frail, and this place takes away even the few things that had kept her occupied. There’s no Kureno to talk to, nothing to read, nothing to listen to. 

She’ll make it ten years. She doesn’t know about the rest.

She sleeps without meaning to, and only wakes up when food is delivered: it’s a breakfast, if minimal. The maid sets it down and leaves, like she’s afraid of touching Akito, like she’s afraid of being near her for very long. Akito looks at the meal for a long time. 

She hates natto.

She eats the rice, at least, and picks at the fish; she drinks the soup once it’s gone cold, and then presses the tray back to the furthest point from herself to make it easier for the maid to come get it. Hatori would scold her, she thinks, about eating too little, but it isn’t like there’s anything for her to be doing. Even the little amount of exercise she got previously is even more reduced now, and Akito doesn’t think her health matters that much if all she’s going to be doing is sleeping between meals. 

She pitches over to the side at the thought, back against the wall. She lets her fingers trace patterns on the tatami without really seeing them, her mind drifting. 

It’s boring. She’s bored. She tries to imagine a lifetime of this and she can’t: her mind can’t wrap around it when she hasn’t even been here a day. She wonders if her mind will slow down, after awhile. If there’s no one to ever speak to her, will she still remember how to talk? If there’s nothing to think about, will she even think? 

Does that even count as being alive?

“Maybe I’ll grow my hair out,” Akito says, vaguely. She wonders if they’ll still come to cut it now that she’s imprisoned. How much of the lie was important to other people and how much of it was just a means to control her? It isn’t like Akito cares, really -- all the important people know who and what she really is, and she’d rather people not think of her at all. 

She wants to fade out into just a bad memory. 

But -- Shigure had told her that he’d liked to have seen her hair long. She eyes a strand of it where it falls into her field of vision. Shigure said he thought she’d look beautiful, and Akito thinks he might have been lying, but it’s a memory that still makes her feel warm, still makes her want to stretch her hands out in the hope of reaching that feeling one more time.

She doesn’t move. She wonders how long until even her most important memories fade. How much of her life has she already forgotten? How much more will she forget? She doesn’t have any answers for herself, and she doesn’t want to.

“This sucks,” Akito says, because she feels like she has to keep talking or she’ll forget how. She has to make it until everyone else can hit adulthood and do what she couldn’t: leave.

Akito sighs, then closes her eyes. She builds a house in her mind: traditional architecture, wood and tatami, doors that slide open to reveal brilliant flowers and the quiet sound of a shishi-odoshi wasting away the seconds next to a pond. She builds it up, board by board and nail by nail, imagines it room by room.

She always falls asleep before she can get to the people.

-

Akito skips lunch and doesn’t bother to wake up until dinner, and only then because if she sleeps any longer she’s going to hit the point of having the really weird dreams where she starts trying to convince street signs she’s the king of England or something. Dinner is -- just about the same thing as breakfast, complete with natto, which she gently sets by the door before the smell can infect the rest of the food on the plate anymore than necessary. She eats slowly, because it’s something to do and something to focus on, but she doesn’t really taste any of it. Once she’s done, she stretches out as far as she goes, feels her muscles protests and her bones pop into place, and then she lays on her back on the tatami and stares at the ceiling.

She imagines her life if it was different. 

If she’d been born as just the head of household. She imagines it, creates an alternate reality within her mind that she can attach herself to: she rewrites Ren, rewrites Akira. It’s terribly self-indulgent, and she knows it doesn’t fix anything, but what else does she have to work on, now? She has no solutions because there’s nowhere to go. 

Technically, she has no problems, so… that’s almost an upside.

But: she imagines. A life with parents that love her, that raise her as she is. She imagines herself with long hair; she imagines Shigure falling in love with her under normal circumstances. Sometimes, in her mind, the curse doesn’t exist at all; other times it exists so that she can heroically break it and free them all. Sometimes she imagines herself in a far-off country speaking a foreign language with an entirely different life and an entirely different name.

It’s something.

-

A week in, and Akito is composing a very elaborate alternate reality in which she has a younger brother and both of her parents have tragically died, leaving her to care for her sibling alone when she meets her younger brother’s attractive literature teacher, Shigure--

It’s a nice thought, and it’s ruined by the sound of the door opening. 

Akito pauses in the middle of trying to decide what she would wear for a theoretical first date in this hypothetical reality, and slowly sits up.

Ren is there. Akito drops her eyes immediately. Ren can’t get her anymore -- even Ren wouldn’t dare break into the room just to hurt Akito -- but Ren can hurt other people, and Akito reminds herself of this in an automatic mantra as the taste of copper fills her mouth.

“Well,” Ren says, sounding so pleasant. “You’re certainly settling in well.”

“It’s where I belong,” Akito says, softly. She drops her voice down as low as she can, sounds as little like a girl as possible. _I’m nothing; don’t waste your time on me_ , she thinks. Ren walks from one side of the room to the other, letting her nails hit each of the bars along the way.

“Even a mistake like you can be taught their place,” Ren says, and there’s a bite to the words that might matter if it was the first time Akito had heard them. It isn’t. Akito looks to the side, then remembers there are no screens there to slide open and reveal the engawa -- there’s just a wall, sturdy and bland. 

Akito doesn’t say anything. It’s a careful thing, to speak enough to not risk angering her mother while only ever saying the right things. She wants to be left alone. That’s what this is supposed to be -- Akito, alone, for the rest of her life, however tragically short or unfortunately long that may be. Instead, Ren is there, to rub salt into the wound knowing that even _now_ Akito can’t stand against her.

“I saw Kureno,” Ren says, casually. 

“He must be happy,” Akito says, and leans back against the wall, “to finally be rid of me.” She hopes he’s happy. She knows he doesn’t resent her for it -- he stayed with her of his own will, no matter what the rest of the household thought -- but he can finally be free. There’s no reason that he should have to stay in the estate, with Akito gone and his curse long since broken. 

“He cleaned your room out so quickly,” Ren says. “They’ll never get rid of the smell, but it’s almost like you were never there.”

Akito doesn’t flinch, but her hands go to the beads at her wrist automatically, tracing across the familiar shape. She could take them off in here, if she wanted: there’s no one but her to see, no one but her to deal with the aftermath. 

“Burn it down,” Akito suggests, almost idly. “That’ll get the smell out.”

She isn’t exactly _surprised_ when the rock hits her, but she still flinches at the sudden sting, reaching a hand up to press against the new wound on her cheek and blink away the blood in her eye. She looks at Ren, furious and beautiful, like some sort of unhinged witch, and then looks away.

“Sorry,” Akito says, automatically.

“You’ve cost me enough,” Ren spits, and leaves.

Akito watches her go, watches the door slam and the lock click, and sighs. That could have gone worse.

-

Akito wakes up at eight in the morning, exactly, because the door is opening, but not the one that leads into the room with all the bars but the one that, you know, people can actually walk through. She sits up and rubs at her eyes, because she’s never been a quick riser and she’s even worse at it now that her sleep schedule has absolutely no reason to follow the rules of society, and her yawn winds up being timed perfectly with Hatori stepping into the room.

“Ha--” she starts, and then the yawn continues and she mumbles the rest of his name around it. It makes her face hurt.

“If that’s what you want to call me,” Hatori offers, his voice a little wry. He drops down next to Akito, all business as he kneels in his suit, and holds a hand out to steady her face. “Let me see.”

“It’s fine,” Akito says. “I’ve had worse.”

Hatori looks at her, because he knows that -- he’s _treated_ her for worse, after Ren’s rampages or Akito’s own self-destructive tendencies, but he doesn’t continue arguing and she doesn’t stop him when he angles her face into the light. 

“Is anything obstructing your vision?” Hatori asks. 

“No,” Akito says. “I can see fine.” 

“Good,” Hatori says. “You won’t need stitches, but this would have healed better if I’d been called last night.”

“Ah,” Akito says. “You’re right. I’ll phone you immediately next time.”

Hatori looks at her, and despite the fact that he maintains her dry sense of humor is not an effective way to cope with trauma, he offers her a smile all the same. He opens his briefcase, takes out all the appropriate items to clean a wound.

“This is going to sting,” Hatori says. Akito makes a face, but doesn’t resist: Hatori is gentle and quick about it, cleaning out the wound. He has to pull part of the scab away, and Akito can feel the wound better now, the way the rock caught her at the edge of her cheek and skated just past the edge of her eye. It stings, of course, but it hurts less than a lot of things, and Akito associates the sting of antiseptic with Hatori’s gentle care, so it’s more soothing than anything. 

“I’m surprised she let you see me,” Akito says. She stays still as Hatori works, and doesn’t bother to watch him when she knows the routine well enough. He dries her cheek again, careful around the wound, and then applies the bandage.

“Rest assured that I’ll always find a way to come when you’re injured,” Hatori says, dryly, “but please don’t use that as an excuse to get hurt.” 

“I’m not making that promise,” Akito says, because she can’t: even if it makes Hatori’s job harder, even if it makes his _life_ harder, seeing him has always been a bright spot in the dismal backdrop of her life. 

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Hatori says. “There. I’m leaving you with eyedrops and fresh bandages. If it gets infected, tell someone.”

“I’ll use the natto to spell out “help”,” Akito offers, and Hatori fixes her with a look a that’s a little too fond to be entirely serious. “How’s everyone?”

“They’re fine,” Hatori says. 

“Even Shigure?” Akito asks. She draws her knees up to her chest and lays her head on them, looks over at Hatori and wonders at the fact that the outside world keeps turning whether or not she’s there to witness it. Trees and forests, after all.

“He’s angry,” Hatori says. “Ayame has been staying with him. Kureno’s intending to move outside, but he can’t do so immediately without raising suspicions.”

Akito reaches out, grabs the silk of Hatori’s tie and lets it fall through her fingers. “She hasn’t done anything to the kids?”

“No,” Hatori says. “She’s barely been seen outside of her rooms. Kureno has been doing all the work.”

“Make sure he sleeps,” Akito says, and lets the tie fall. “He forgets, if I’m not there.”

“He’s a grown adult,” Hatori says.

“He’s an airhead,” Akito replies. Hatori does not object to this, because it’s a truth that they both know to be true, even if Hatori is usually too polite to say it.

“I can’t stay long,” Hatori says, finally, closing his briefcase again after setting out the supplies he was leaving with Akito.

“I know,” Akito says. Hatori turns back to her, and Akito waits a heartbeat -- then two, then three -- then slowly shifts forward, pitches into Hatori. He wraps his arms around her, soothingly, pets her head and doesn’t try to run from her presence. 

“I hate it,” Akito says, and her voice cracks, and she hates that, too. “She won’t leave me alone even here.”

“I know,” Hatori says. “I’m sorry.”

Akito wants to scream; she wants to tell him that it isn’t his fault and he has nothing to apologize for, but he _does_ \-- he wouldn’t raise a hand to stop her from being locked away anymore than anyone else in the juunishi, and it’s as unfair as it is immutable. 

She doesn’t. It’s his curse as much as it’s hers, and she understands. She can’t run away from this place anymore than he can help her. 

She just stays against him, instead, for as long as she can. 

“Hatori,” she says, and hates how small she sounds. “Hatori, promise me that one day you’ll leave this place.”

“Akito--”

“Promise me you’ll leave the Sohma behind,” Akito says. 

Hatori is quiet for a long moment. “I promise,” he says, and Akito knows it’s a lie -- she knows it with all of her being -- but she wants it to be the truth. She can let it be the truth, because that gives her imprisonment a purpose, it gives her suffering some sort of reason in the universe. 

Akito pulls away from him, after a long moment. If he stays longer than he needs to, it’ll just awaken the ire of Ren or the suspicion of the maids, because why would anyone stay around the cat any longer than they needed to? 

“Thank you,” Akito says, “for coming.”

“Eat your natto,” Hatori says, and lightly ruffles her hair. “It’s healthy.”

-

She feels better after Hatori’s visit, which is worse, in the grand scheme of things. It reminds her that despite all her attempts and all of her mother’s best efforts, her bonds with the people she cares about are still one of the only things keeping her going.

She doesn’t _want_ to keep going.

There’s no mirrors in the house, so Akito only catches glimpses of her reflection in the water of the bath, in the metal of the faucet. She wonders if she looks different. Probably not -- it’s only been a week -- but she can see the ugly, raised red of the fresh wound on her cheek. She wonders if it’ll scar. It’s rare for Ren to do anything that’d cause visible damage like that, but Akito supposes it doesn’t matter when there’s no one else around to see.

She applies the eye drops and changes her bandages dutifully, and time starts to slip by, little by little. It feels agonizing, at first, like every hour is a struggle and every day is a year, but it starts to normalize, after awhile. She thinks of her life, if it was different; she thinks of everyone else.

Sometimes, she doesn’t think at all, and doesn’t even realize it until she startles back out of it, hours later and with no memory of the period in between. 

She’s stopped having nightmares, at least.

-

Akito gets her period, which is one of the only reasons she realizes how much time has past.

“Huh,” she says when she wakes up, feels the swelling of muscles inside of her abdomen that either means her period or food poisoning, and she doubts anyone would stoop to the latter. Probably. But the bathroom is well stocked with toiletries, even if none of them are particularly nice, and she doesn’t have any painkillers, but soaking in the bath makes things a little more tolerable.

She wonders, though. She’d heard the previous cat had a child, and she wishes she’d looked into that further. It couldn’t have been anyone else within the juunishi, but she knows that he lived long enough in isolation that he had grandchildren before he passed, and she wants to know how that works. Was he allowed visitors? Was it a clandestine meeting?

Ah, she’s starting to sound like Shigure.

It isn’t that Akito regrets how little of life she got to experience -- it’s for the best, because now there’s nothing she can remember and wish she was still able to do -- but it still winds up in her mind, in that alternate universe she’s constructed. That maybe she could have gotten married and had a child. 

She thinks she’d have liked a girl.

-

A maid is the next person to use the door. No, not a maid: _the_ maid, the one that has been present around both Akito and Ren for as long as Akito can remember, her grey hair pulled back neatly and her kimono always perfectly pressed.

Akito just stares at her, because it’s been -- uh, like, a month? More? -- since Akito last had any human contact that wasn’t touching food trays. 

“Sit down and turn around,” the woman instructs, briskly. “I’m here to cut your hair.”

Akito does as she’s told, but frowns. “Why?”

“I’ve always cut your hair,” the woman says.

Akito gauges how much she can push the woman based on the fact that unlike her mother, the maid has never actually hit Akito in anger. She’s locked her in her old room a few times, but that punishment was always sort of lacklustre when Akito knew she was heading at rocket speed towards an entire life imprisoned. 

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Akito says. “Does it?”

“It matters to your mother,” the maid says, and Akito notes that as ever, the maid does not refer to her as the head of the household. She _is_ , technically, but only in that technicality: Kureno has been doing the brunt of the work since he was a teenager, and there’s a mild succession war going on in the estate, since Akira never had a child that was capable of it. 

Akito doesn’t say anything. She sits still and lets her hair get trimmed back into the same length she’s always had, and she scratches at the base of her neck once she’s able to move again. The maid doesn’t bother to clean up the hair when she leaves, which is fine, because it means that Akito spends the next several hours slowly sweeping it up with her hands, which is a pointless and useless task but at least it’s something to do.

She lays back, finally, back flat against the tatami and eyes looking unseeing up at the ceiling, and rolls the end of her bangs between her fingers.

“I guess it doesn’t matter either way,” Akito says, and lets her hand fall back against the floor.

-

Akito dreams:

She’s a child, in a kimono with tsubaki around the edges. She stands in the middle of the rest of the juunishi, from Hatori to Hiro, twelve people in a line around her. She blinks, and they’ve all turned to animals, the truth of their forms against the black backdrop of her dreamworld. Hatori’s dragonscales reflect light that has no source, and Yuki climbs onto Hatsuharu to be seen.

Akito hears the meow of a cat.

“I’m sorry,” she hears, but she doesn’t know if she’s the one who says it. “I’m sorry.”

-

“Akito.”

Akito wakes up, more easily than usual with the moon still high in the sky. “Kureno?” She’s disoriented, for a moment: Kureno’s voice brings her back to her own room, with a different ceiling and the smell of tsubaki, and it takes her a moment to realize where she is.

At least that sinking feeling has gone away, whenever she remembers.

“Are you alright?” Kureno asks. He sits down by the bars and sticks his arm through the grate, and Akito nearly stumbles moving over to him to clutch at his hand. “I’m sorry. That was a dumb question.”

“I’m fine,” Akito says. “But why are you here?”

“She went to the onsen,” Kureno says, and Akito relaxes a touch, moves forward to lean against the bars until Kureno can put an arm around her. “There’s no one watching.”

“She hasn’t let you move out?” Akito asks.

“She threatened to stop approving any of the tuition reimbursements,” Kureno says, and even Kureno, sweet Kureno that has the patience of a kindergarten teacher, sounds frustrated. “Not in as many words.”

Akito puffs out a sigh, and Kureno rubs at her shoulder. 

“I have something for you,” Kureno says, after a moment. He reaches into his pocket, withdraws a small piece of paper and offers it to Akito. “From Shigure-niisan.”

Akito feels something in her chest clench. He’s one of the only things Akito is upset she had to leave behind. 

“Hatori-niisan can take a letter back, if he sees you first,” Kureno says.

“That’s dangerous,” Akito murmurs, and wonders if she has a pencil in the entirety of her glorified jail cell. 

“It’ll keep him from breaking into the estate,” Kureno says, and sounds both very tired and very convinced that Shigure would, in fact, break into the estate. Shigure has already stated that he’d be more than happy to sweep Akito away to a place where no one could ever find her, to ignore the curse and the family both.

“I thought,” Akito says, softly, “maybe he’d forget about me.”

Kureno reaches up. He holds Akito’s cheek in his hand and gives her a smile that looks exactly the same as it did when she was a child.

“He’s loved you since before you were born,” Kureno says, gently, because it makes Akito ache and she’s certain he can see it. “I don’t think any of us could forget someone as important as you.”

“I’m not important,” Akito says, which is a wild denial that she wishes was true, sometimes. “Especially not to you, Kureno. Your curse broke already. You should be able to leave.”

“Akito,” Kureno says. “I’m not leaving.”

Akito bites back the hysterical laughter that’s bubbling up in her throat. “Why?”

“Because I promised to be there for you,” Kureno says. “A long, long time ago.”

“You promised god,” Akito says. “Not me.” 

“I promised you both,” Kureno says, carefully, and Akito tries to pretend her breath doesn’t hitch, but it does; it hitches on the frayed end of a bond she doesn’t deserve to have, it hitches on a thousand promises, it hitches on the knowledge that she is where she is because of her own doing.

“We’re all,” Akito says, and turns as close into Kureno as she can, “so stupid, aren’t we?”

Kureno doesn’t reply to that, just combs his hand over her hair and kisses the top of her head as well as he can, and she holds onto him as long as she can and wishes it could be longer.


	2. Chapter 2

Shigure cared about very few things, as a child. He’d heard his parents had been concerned, because he so rarely cried even as an infant, but he’d grown up into a chatty and intelligent toddler, and then progressed into the true stages of childhood. 

He thought that maybe he was just different. The world could move, with or without him, and he was more interested in seeing how it worked than anything else -- the way people reacted to things, the way the world could be changed by the smallest of actions. It was fascinating.

Hatori told him it made him seem creepy, but Hatori also looked so grumpy all the time he’d made two different girls cry in kindergarten, so Shigure deftly considered him a poor judge of these things.

And then: Shigure dreamed.

Of god. Backlit by white until it blotted out her figure, but it didn’t need to be visual when he could hear her voice and feel her presence so strongly that it moved him to tears. _I’ll be there soon_ , she said, and Shigure woke up crying, his heart aching with the feeling of something he hadn’t even known he was missing. 

He held onto that feeling. Hatori analyzed it, Ayame compartmentalized it, Kureno accepted it wide-eyed as a fact of life, and all of them waited for the birth. Shigure knew what love meant, at five years old, and intended to make good on that feeling and that promise. 

Then Akira took Akito into his arms and found a kitten instead of a baby, and things went rapidly downhill from there.

-

“Gure-san! I’ve arrived, and I have brought both food and drink to accompany me!” Ayame slams the door open, and Shigure looks up from the book he’d been failing to read for the past several hours.

“Aaya!” Shigure sets the book down and offers him a smile, as cheerful and carefree as can be. “There’s no one I’d rather waste the hours away with!” 

Ayame sets his bag on the table, and it’s so weighed down that it jostles the wood.

“I’ve brought more than enough to keep us up the entire night,” Ayame offers, cheerfully, and unpacks it while Shigure watches with a mild sense of curiosity. Ayame, true to form, has brought multiple bottles of liquor and several stacks of take away snacks from one of the shops on the way -- takoyaki, gyoza, and kaarage, on first glance, and Shigure reaches over to grab one of the containers of takoyaki.

“Oh, I could keep you up all night even without all this, Aaya!” Shigure says. It’s natural and easy to fall into the dialogue, even if there’s no one there to witness it. Neither Shigure nor Ayame ever bother to alter their personalities to fit different situations, so the familiarity is comforting, if nothing else. 

“I’ll look forward to it, Gure-san!” Ayame drops down to sit at the table, letting his elbow drop onto the surface so he can perch and look at Shigure. “You’re free to cry on my shoulder, of course.”

“I’ll get us cups,” Shigure says, instead, voice wry as he stands up. 

“I understand, I understand! You’re overwhelmed by my generosity! Of course, I couldn’t leave you alone on a night where your true love is being locked away from you,” Ayame says. “No matter how tragic the circumstance, I will always be--”

Shigure steps back over and sets the cups down a little too hard, and Ayame cuts off. 

“Aaya,” Shigure says, very delicately, “could you, maybe, not rub it in?”

Ayame stops, which is a small miracle that Shigure is grateful for. All of the juunishi have their flaws and their idiosyncrasies, and as much as many of them have tried to grow from them, Ayame has yet to fully understand what normal human boundaries and emotions are. Well, Shigure supposes it’s better than him; Shigure understands all the human emotions and people’s reactions -- he just doesn’t _care_ , generally. 

“Of course,” Ayame says, a little more serious. He busies himself with pouring sake, and Shigure settles back down. Honestly, he’s not adverse to the company, given that all he was doing previously was running through all the different ways he could manage to fix the situation and how none of them would work -- it’s just that being reminded of how useless he is actually _bothers_ him, just a little for the first time in his life.

It’s pretty annoying, actually.

“Truthfully,” Ayame says, carefully, swirling the sake in his cup for a moment, “I was surprised to see you here. I had thought you might go and break her out.”

“That’s called kidnapping, Aaya.”

“Is it any worse than her current fate?” Ayame asks. 

Shigure knocks back his entire glass without actually tasting any of it, and Ayame refills it automatically, because it isn’t like they haven’t seen each other sloppy drunk before. 

“If I thought she’d leave, I’d take her,” Shigure says. “I’d have done it years ago.” 

Ayame is quiet for a long moment, which is rare, even under a conversation like this. 

“I thought,” Ayame says, “you’d be able to convince her.”

Shigure had tried. He’d tried until he’d realized he was never going to convince her with words, and then he’d tried every other way he could think of and none of that had worked, either. Akito seemed like less of a person and more of a concept -- a girl in the wrong clothes, a cat with the wrong spirit. 

“Do you know why the cat never runs?” Shigure asks, conversationally.

“Because the cat is the cat,” Ayame answers, automatically. 

“Even when god isn’t born, the cat can’t disobey,” Shigure says. “But god _was_ born.”

Ayame doesn’t reply. It’s thin ice, and it’s considered to be next to blasphemy, these days -- Ren has eliminated all mention that Akito was ever meant to be born god. The prophetic dreams were regarded as a shared mistake, and it’s been steadily erased from the collective consciousness of almost everyone. Ritsu doesn’t remember, and none of the younger juunishi were ever aware to begin with. None of them were ever allowed close enough to Akito to realize. 

Shigure can feel it, if he tries hard enough. Something, somewhere deep in his chest, past that gut-wrenching loathing that she’s the cat is nothing but longing, nothing but the spirit in him and the child he once was crying out for what they were promised; for the god and the girl that they should have had by now. 

“You told her,” Ayame says. “Didn’t you?”

“She didn’t believe me,” Shigure says. “And with Kureno there repeating every lie she’s heard, I don’t know if she could.” Shigure knocks back most of his sake in one go again, but at least this time he goes slow enough to taste it. It’s pretty good. Ayame usually shells out for the good stuff; even if the Sohma allowances have been rapidly decreased for anyone that doesn’t constantly pledge allegiance to Ren, Ayame’s shop makes enough money to stand on its own. 

“Ah, Gure-san, you’re really in a mess, aren’t you?” Ayame says, his sigh as overacted and theatrical as ever. He refills Shigure’s cup, then knocks back his own sake. He sets the cup down to start in on the gyoza, and Shigure refills Ayame’s cup, almost idly. He wonders how long they’ll keep up the pretense of _not_ drinking straight from the bottle. 

“Calling it a mess is putting it politely,” Shigure says. 

“But you aren’t going to give up,” Ayame comments.

It’s fascinating, how someone as unaware as Ayame can simultaneously be so intuitive when he needs to be and when it’s the least convenient option for everyone else around him.

“No,” Shigure says. “I’m not going to give up.” 

“Then,” Ayame says, “I’ll drink to your good fortune!” He says it and knocks back his sake, slamming his cup back down on the table.

“I’ve gotta get bigger cups,” Shigure says, and refills his glass.

-

Shigure’s alarm is an unwelcome and unpleasant device that jars him out of a particularly lacklustre dream about trying to call his parents on a phone that constantly connects him to the wrong person. He smacks it a few times, until it goes quiet; he goes back to sleep.

He wakes up again to the feeling of water dripping steadily down his forehead.

“Ah,” Shigure says.

Hatori looks down at him, exasperated and unsurprised, holding a water cup in his hand. “It’s past noon,” Hatori says. 

“Was our lunch date today?” Shigure asks, knowing full well that it was. It hadn’t been his intention to oversleep quite so badly, but the upside of being a writer was that he could fully make his own hours, which was great until he had reasons to be awake. 

Also, of course, the hangover. 

“Where’s Aaya?” Shigure asks, sitting up and wincing at the feeling of the headache trying to spread all the way down into his shoulders.

“Left before I got here,” Hatori says. “He probably didn’t want to be late opening the shop.”

Shigure does not say it outloud, because it would be meaner than he cares to be, even as grumpy as he is, but he does wonder if there’s truth to the idiom that idiots don’t get hangovers, given that they’d had the same amount to drink and Shigure feels like a truck hit him.

“Haa-san, I can’t go today,” Shigure says, dropping his voice into a whine and flopping back down onto the futon (which he now realizes is not only crooked, but laid half on top of a stack of books, which accounts for the soreness in his shoulders).

Hatori holds the cup of water out, and Shigure opens one eye to stare at it and then slowly take it.

“Get cleaned up,” Hatori says, unwavering even in the face of Shigure’s clear pain. “I rescheduled the reservation for one thirty.”

“So cruel,” Shigure sighs, but he downs the water and stands up, scratching at the back of his head. “Then, make yourself comfortable…”

Hatori glances at the relative mess that is Shigure’s room, then looks back at Shigure, pointedly. Shigure, however, is still immune to criticism, even from Hatori, so he only offers a cheerful shrug.

“Suit yourself,” Shigure says, and goes to take a shower. 

By the time Shigure makes it back down, he smells decidedly fresher and Hatori has cleaned the majority of the previous night’s trash off the table. 

“You should take better care of your living space,” Hatori says.

“We can’t all have the maids clean up after us, Haa-san,” Shigure says, offering a sigh. “It must be so nice at the main house, never having to lift a finger…”

“You could hire your own maid,” Hatori says.

“That’s expensive, Haa-san,” Shigure says, following Hatori as Hatori leaves the house, kicking his shoes back on. 

“Don’t you make enough?” Hatori asks. “You were on the bestseller list.”

“Well, after all the publisher’s cut, and the agent fees, and the editor’s payment,” Shigure says, “it really isn’t as much money as you’d think.”

Hatori accepts this, largely because -- and Shigure is extremely sure of this -- Hatori has no concept of how much things actually cost when you don’t have Sohma money to throw around, given his penchant for designer suits. 

“Whatever you’re paying your agent,” Hatori says, “it isn’t enough.” 

“That’s mean,” Shigure says, opening the car door to drop into the passenger seat with his arms folded up into his sleeves. Hatori does not roll his eyes, because he has too much dignity for that and is far too mature, but he does give Shigure a look before he starts the car up. 

They’re quiet for most of the drive to the restaurant; they’re seated on an outside patio, and a glance at the menu convinces Shigure that Hatori _definitely_ doesn’t know how money works outside of the Sohma estate. It’s fine, because Hatori is paying, but man, that was pricier than Shigure was expecting for a friendly lunch.

“So,” Shigure says, once they’ve ordered. “What did you want to talk about? If you’re going to give me your sympathies, Aaya’s already done it.”

“I wasn’t,” Hatori says. “I was going to tell you not to try anything.”

“What would I try?” Shigure says, spreading his hands. 

“This may come as a shock,” Hatori says, dryly, “but I don’t know what goes on inside your head.”

Shigure smiles, faintly and without any particular joy. “As I told Aaya, she doesn’t want to be saved.”

“The fact that you’d let that stop you is astounding.”

“Hmm,” Shigure says. “It isn’t that I intend to stop, but it won’t do any good to break the doors down and carry her out kicking and screaming.” 

“I imagine the temptation is still there,” Hatori says.

“It is,” Shigure admits, because he makes a concentrated effort not to lie to Hatori, and it isn’t like he hasn’t had the fantasy of dragging Akito away -- but she’s tied down by obligation. He wants her to move beyond the things tying her in place, but he can’t do it for her, as much as he’d like. “She’s afraid Ren will retaliate against the rest of us, and the kids can’t fight back.” 

Hatori looks far away for a moment, and Shigure knows it’s the weight of the family more than the curse. One feeds into another like an endless loop, but the curse isn’t the only explanation for some of the astoundingly terrible people in the Sohma family. Rin’s parents weren’t going to win any awards even if she hadn’t been the horse; Yuki and Ayame’s mother had only ever had kids to see what she could get out of them. 

“It would be easier, if she was only the cat,” Hatori says. “She’d still have a lifetime of Ren’s abuse to overcome, but she’s strong enough that the sense of obligation might not matter.”

“Haa-san, Haa-san, you’re entering dangerous territory,” Shigure says, tipping his water glass from side to side and watching the liquid threaten to spill. It doesn’t. 

“I don’t want to hear that from you,” Hatori says.

“She _is_ strong,” Shigure says, “but even someone as strong as her might struggle. Locked in a room like that, surrounded by people that hate her… This is the first time visitors have been banned, you know.”

Hatori blinks. 

“It’s true,” Shigure says. “Of course, that’s because previously no one has _wanted_ to visit the cat.”

“It’s because even the kids know,” Hatori says, and Shigure can’t help the sharp look he gives him. “I’m aware that we can’t discuss this, but you’re hardly the one that’s going to turn me in for it, so you might as well listen. They don’t know that she’s god; they’ve never met her, but they can feel that something is different. They’ve all wanted to meet her.”

“They haven’t tried to, have they?” Shigure asks. It isn’t concern for them -- he cares about the juunishi, of course, but he’s more worried that Ren would retaliate directly against Akito if her secret was remotely out. Well, one of her secrets. 

“No,” Hatori says. “The ones who have parents involved in their lives have warned them away from it, and the ones who don’t have been too afraid to ask anyone.”

“Except you?” Shigure asks.

“Yuki asked Ayame,” Hatori says, “and Momiji asked me, but that was the extent of it.”

“Ren must be extraordinarily terrifying to them,” Shigure says, “without their god to protect them.”

“Apparently,” Hatori says, with a small note of amusement in his voice, “the younger kids were convinced she was a ghost.”

“Ahh, she’d be much less annoying if that were true,” Shigure says.

“You’d have to take up exorcism as a hobby,” Hatori says. 

“I’m sure there are still practicing exorcists _somewhere_ we could hire,” Shigure says with a flap of his hand, and Hatori cracks a rare smile.

“Are there?” Hatori says, sounding unconvinced, as the food arrives.

-

Shigure is banned from living at the main house, but not from _visiting_ \-- largely because it would prove impossible even for the head of the family to completely ban one of the juunishi. He waits a few days, all the same, before he ventures to the estate: he doesn’t want his presence to be mistaken for trying to break Akito out. He stays well away from the corner of the estate that the isolation room is located in, which is easy enough since he wants to see the family records more than anything else.

The room is dusty. It’d be surprising, but Shigure imagines that Ren has made no effort to keep the family history up, and the maids are likely busy with her whims. It works out in his favor, even if he has to pull his sleeve up over his face more than once when removing a box sends a cloud of dust several feet into the air.

All the records are there, though. They’re not filed so much as thrown carelessly into cardboard boxes and wooden crates, but he finds what he’s looking for. The records of all the juunishi births have been kept for centuries -- the original few cycles have been lost to time, but at some point someone began to transcribe the important parts every hundred years or so, and the antique papers try to crumble even under his careful touch. 

He doesn’t quite get what he’s looking for. He finds the records, yes, the names of the previous cursed and their birthdates, but there isn’t much else, particularly as it pertains to the cat. Sometimes there will be a note about lineage and succession, but the cat lacks death dates, half the time, seemingly entirely forgotten once they’ve been placed in isolation.

It’s frustrating, but not surprising. He writes down the names of the previous cats, as many as he can, and notes that he’ll have to go further into the records another day. There’s more than one room on the Sohma estate that houses the books, but he can’t risk hitting them all in the same day. The last thing he wants is anyone to think he’s up to something specific instead of ambiguously shady, as he usually is.

He stands in the hall and brushes the dust off his kimono, stifling a sneeze as he starts to head back. 

Predictably, his luck holds out in that he isn’t caught near the records room, but runs out before he can completely escape the estate.

“Oh? How surprising,” Ren says, “to see a stray dog wandering the halls.”

Shigure thinks some _extremely_ uncharitable thoughts before he turns to face Ren, smile present on his face and dust stained fingers securely in his sleeves.

“We’re quite well known for wandering to shelter,” Shigure says. Ren smiles, and it’s a dark, confident thing; she steps forward and reaches out to touch him, and Shigure keeps the smile carefully in place on his face. 

“That’s right,” Ren says. “You’ll always come back to your owner, won’t you?”

“Of course,” Shigure says, knowing they’re discussing two very different people. She strokes his cheek, and it’s a lover’s caress that makes him want to shove her off the engawa and hope she drowns in the six inch pool of water. He’s fairly certain the koi would eat her, eventually. “Loyalty is a dog’s best quality.”

Ren’s smile stretches, and Shigure feels exactly zero guilt for spreading the rumor that she was a ghost. When she makes the skin on her face stretch like that, she certainly _looks_ the part, all that black hair falling in a sheet against her pale skin.

“You should teach that wretched cat how to be loyal,” Ren says, and her hand curls on Shigure’s cheek, red nails scraping across the skin. “He doesn’t know how grateful he should be.”

Is it matricide if you kill your mother-in-law before you’re married, or is just murder, Shigure wonders with the idle portion of his brain he keeps running during situations like this. It could be parricide. He’ll have to look up the specifics. 

“I don’t know that he’s the sort to learn lessons,” Shigure says, and thinks again of Hatori: “She’s strong”, he’d said, and Shigure believes him. Akito was strong enough to survive 18 years of this woman -- she can survive isolation until he can figure out a way to overthrow the entire system. “But I’d be glad to teach him, if you--”

Ren slaps him, which Shigure was half expecting, given her mercurial personality. It still stings.

“Ow,” Shigure says.

“I won’t let you near him,” Ren says in a hiss, like she hadn’t just stated that Shigure should, in fact, go near him. “Don’t forget who you’re loyal to. I’m the head of this family. I’m your god.”

Ah. Deicide, then, but only metaphorically, since Shigure would have actually have burnt down the estate years ago if Ren was ever connected to the juunishi in any meaningful way, much less actually god.

“Of course,” Shigure says. He reaches forward, pulls a strand of Ren’s hair forward and then lets it slip back through his fingers. “You’re gracious to have let him live here so long.”

“I am,” Ren says. “It was very gracious of me, to let a monster like that taint my home for so long.”

Frankenstein was the doctor, Shigure thinks, absently. 

“Yes,” Shigure agrees, simply.

Ren turns, apparently satisfied by the agreement, however meagre it might be. “Leave,” she says, with an airy wave of her hand. “I can’t stand to see that monster and you in the same day.”

Shigure’s mind sharpens, but he simply takes a step backwards. “I’ll take my leave,” he offers, and Ren ignores him entirely, drifting away to haunt some other part of the estate. Shigure takes another step until he’s safely in one of the indoor halls, and then begins to walk normally, letting out a sigh when he’s safely out of earshot. To see them both in the same day, huh…?

“Shigure-niisan?”

Apparently, Shigure was _also_ going to have to see his two least favorite people in the same day. He doesn’t bother to keep his smile up when he turns to look at Kureno.

“I’m on my way out,” Shigure says.

Kureno seems to hesitate. He glances back in the direction Ren was, and then steps forward, grabbing Shigure’s sleeve. Shigure moves his arm like he’s going to jerk it away, and Kureno holds on harder.

“I need to speak with you,” Kureno says, quietly, entirely too close to Shigure for Shigure to be comfortable. 

“You’re speaking right now,” Shigure says.

“Please,” Kureno says. He certainly sounds desperate, even if everything about him seems so fundamentally wrong. “For Akito’s sake.”

“So,” Shigure says. “That _is_ how it is, huh?” 

Kureno doesn’t waver. He just looks at Shigure, and Shigure sighs, finally, because this is clearly becoming an entire thing and because he wants to get to the bottom of it.

For Akito’s sake, sure, but Shigure’s sake, too.

“If you can’t slip away,” Shigure says, and drops his voice low as he finally reaches out to forcibly remove Kureno’s hand from his arm, “then work something out with Haa-san.”

“Alright,” Kureno says, and steps back when Shigure gives him a small shove.

Shigure is, on occasions like this, extremely glad that he doesn’t have to live on the estate.

-

Hatori is never particularly happy to get involved in Shigure’s schemes, but he mediates: alleges that Kureno needs some non-urgent medical attention that needs to be provided at the hospital, and so creates an opening for Kureno and Shigure to meet safely off Sohma property.

“I’m not involved in this,” Hatori says, when they all meet at a cafe that’s nowhere near anything the Sohma usually frequent. 

“I hope you told her that something extremely embarrassing is wrong with him,” Shigure says, and Hatori just sighs as he walks away. There’s a bookstore nearby, and Hatori goes to that; he already walks a thin line, as one of the few people who knows who Akito is that’s still allowed around Akito in any capacity. Shigure doesn’t want that permission to be revoked anymore than Hatori does.

“Well, then,” Shigure says, and offers Kureno a smile that he doesn’t even try to make seem convincing. “What was it you needed to talk to me about?”

Kureno doesn’t say anything for a long moment. It looks like he’s trying to gather his thoughts, and Shigure can respect that, but his patience is on a hair trigger these days.

“You probably already know a lot of it,” Kureno says, finally. 

“I don’t know nearly as much as you might think,” Shigure says. 

“I’ve never hated Akito,” Kureno says.

“For a family with such a large secret,” Shigure says, “it seems most of us aren’t good at keeping them.”

Kureno offers Shigure a look, and then looks away. “I’m terrible at keeping secrets,” Kureno says, “but I’ve done my best to keep this one. My curse broke years ago. We knew… we knew that everyone would be able to tell, and we knew that we couldn’t let Ren know.”

“So you pretended to hate Akito,” Shigure says. “So you could stay with her?”

“I promised I wouldn’t leave her,” Kureno says. “I know there were probably better ways to handle the situation, but I’m not as smart as you.”

Shigure had pieced together parts of it. Someone as strong as Akito wasn’t going to put up with being hated by one of her juunishi, and especially not by someone that knew the truth -- even if Kureno had been young, he remembered the dream as much as the rest of them did. He knew that Akito was more than just the cat.

“I assume you don’t know why it broke,” Shigure says.

“I don’t. Not at all,” Kureno says, and sounds like he hates himself for it. “It happened so suddenly. She felt it, and she managed to find me immediately.”

“No wonder it was a bad plan,” Shigure says, because Akito’s plans have always been a little… Well, it wasn’t as though she thought she had much of a future.

“She doesn’t transform,” Kureno says, “because she’s still God, too, even if I hold her. We pretended it was because I was still cursed. I was never… I never thought she was disgusting. But Ren left her alone more often if she thought I was there, because she thought it must hurt more to be hated by one of the juunishi.”

“Akito wanted to be imprisoned so that Ren would leave the rest of us alone,” Shigure says, “but now that it’s happening, you’re having doubts? That’s pretty low, Kureno.”

“I know,” Kureno says. “I know that I should have done more to stop her when I could. I thought if I was in Ren’s good graces, it would be easier to help out everyone else. Akito wanted me to leave, but I won’t. Not without her.”

“You’re wasting her gift,” Shigure says, mildly.

“It isn’t a gift if she’s suffering for it,” Kureno says. “No matter what she says.” Kureno looks at his hands, helplessly; Shigure watches him and feels something like satisfaction curl in his chest. It’s not fair to Kureno, who has clearly been doing his best for the past several years, but Shigure has never in his life cared about being fair. Kureno was still the one near Akito, to be allowed next to her even under the pretense of hatred -- Shigure was glad to see him upset over his uselessness, in light of that.

“If you’re expecting me to have a plan,” Shigure says, “I don’t.” Which is true. He has the beginnings of a plan; has some ideas and some concepts, but none of them connect, yet, and none of them are strong enough to actually free Akito or anyone else.

“Could you,” Kureno says, “write to her?” 

It wasn’t what Shigure expected. 

“She’s kept all the letters you’ve given her,” Kureno says. He reaches into his bag, pulls out a small stack of letters that Shigure recognizes, his own hand dating back to when it was just a childish scrawl. “She couldn’t risk taking them with her, so she wanted them to go back to you. I thought… if you could write, she could write back. It’s something, isn’t it?”

It’s not the best idea. It’s dangerous, for starters: smuggling letters back and forth under Ren’s nose is playing with fire, but Akito is the one who will get hurt the most by it. Shigure flips through the letters. Most of them are written by him, but here and there are ones written by Akito -- not letters, but stories he’d told her that she’d written down later, notes in on the sides of the paper to ask him about things she was never able to question. He traces down one of the lines, Akito’s careful lettering asking what became of a minor character in one of the fairy tales he’d told her, once.

He doesn’t even remember the fairy tale anymore.

“Stay here,” Shigure says, and stands up. Kureno watches him go, startled, but it’s easy for Shigure to step over to the hostess of the restaurant, to flirt with her enough to get a sheet of paper and a pen. It’s paper marked with the restaurant logo on the top, but it doesn’t matter; he sits back down and writes a letter without stopping to think for more than a moment. 

He’s not used to writing with delicately printed stationary and ball point pens, but it goes quicker, if anything.

“There,” Shigure says, once he’s done. Kureno stays quiet the entire time, sipping on his coffee and watching Shigure without trying to read the words. Shigure folds the letter in two, and hands it back to Kureno, who tucks it away somewhere it won’t be so easily found.

“I’ll keep Ren distracted as often as I can,” Kureno says. “I don’t know how often I’ll be able to see you, but Hatori -- I think he knows about me. Akito isn’t very good at lying to him.”

“Akito’s terrible at lying to anyone but herself and her mother,” Shigure says, dryly, because he could write an entire book on the amount of tells Akito had if she tried to lie about the slightest thing. 

Kureno smiles, but it isn’t at Shigure. 

“That’s why she has me,” Shigure says, and Kureno looks startled for a moment at the sheer audacity of what Shigure says. Shigure is well aware of his faults and of his strengths, and he thinks deception is, these days, far more of a strength than a weakness, especially as it pertains to getting what he wants.

And he will. It’s just a matter of time, at this point.


	3. Chapter 3

The letter reads:

_Akito-san:_

_A little bird told me that you were lonely, so he’ll carry my letters to the top of your tower. All of your old ones are safe with me, so I can finally read all of your comments on my stories from when I was a child. You’d put my editor to shame._

_I’ll always be the one that loves you the most, no matter how often I can see you, or how far away you are. I know you told me that you thought you’d die alone in that place. Did you think any of us were going to allow that?_

_Aaya sends his regards. His shop makes enough money that he barely needs the Sohma family, now. Don’t tell anyone, but he has a girlfriend. I think you’d like her._

_To answer your question: the old woman in the story found her way home and was more than alright despite the snowstorm. Her husband made her dinner and they lived out their years together._

_You’re a terrible liar, by the way. I was never going to believe that you didn’t want to see me._

Akito reads it over: three times in rapid succession, and then twice more, more slowly each time until she finally forces herself to put the letter away before she risks ruining the paper with her tears. It’s overwhelming; it’s stupid. It isn’t that long of a letter at all, and she can see how hastily it was written. It’s on restaurant paper, and Akito traces over the name and wonders what they serve, what Shigure got, what it’s like.

She drags her finger across the line. _I’ll always be the one that loves you the most_ , it says, and she believes it. God, does she believe it, and she _hates_ it because she wants him to leave her alone, to forget her --

That’s a lie, she thinks. She buries her face into her hands and wishes she could be that selfless kind of person, but she can’t; she isn’t. She wants Shigure to love her. She wants all of the juunishi to love her. She wants to hold them all close -- Kureno included -- and she wants them to be happy for her own selfish sake, wants to prove that the curse can be overcome and that they can be free.

She’d told Shigure she didn’t want to see him again; told him that he didn’t mean anything to him. She’d thought about Ren the entire time until it made her sick to her stomach, acted in the footsteps of the mother that unwillingly bore her, and she’d told him that he was just a means to experience the world.

Really, it was stupid to think that he’d have believed it, but he already lived outside the estate. She wanted him to leave entirely, to leave her behind. She’d _thought_ so, anyway, because the other option -- that Akito wants to be with Shigure more than anything; that she wants to be with all of the juunishi, wants to be outside the isolation room and lead the family and _live_ \-- hurts too much.

It isn’t even a wish. It’s just a passing dream that she’s never able to have, and she knows that. Her choices led her here, and she can’t regret it or she feels like she’ll break.

But--

She looks at the letter again. 

There isn’t hope for her, she doesn’t think, not in the immediate future. She’s going to stay alone in this room until the rest of the juunishi can leave, _if_ they can leave -- her other’s eventual death is the more likely option, and virtually any successor is better as an option. If it’s Kureno, then it’s better (for everyone but him).

Which means: one day. One day, maybe. She wishes she could be the kind of person who tells Shigure not to wait that long, but she isn’t: she wants him to wait long enough, in a far deep down place in her heart she’s been trying to avoid. She wants all of them to wait for her.

The animals have always waited for god before. She hopes they can do it one more time.

-

Akito hides the letter under one of the tatami mats, pressed between one of the obi, which she’d much rather sacrifice to any potential damage than the thin stationary. It’s a multi-step process before she’s certain it can’t be detected. She feels like she can still see it, but that might just be because she knows it’s there. She lays on the spot, stares up at the ceiling and lets her fingers drag across the waves of the reeds. It’s comforting to know it’s there.

It’s comforting to know Shigure is there.

She doesn’t have a pencil, and she doesn’t have paper, so she can’t write back. Instead, she composes the letters in her mind, over and over again, writes a thousand of them to say everything she’s ever wanted to say. 

She thinks about the first time she met him.

It was right after her father died.

In the chaos following Akira’s death, no one’s attention was on Akito. She’d fled; from the confession that her father had loved her despite everything (but not enough); from the weight of his belief that she should be the one to take over the family. She’d run until her feet bled and she was thoroughly lost in the maze of the estate -- she had only ever seen the inside of the same few rooms with her father, because if the cat had to be allowed in the estate then she would only be allowed to taint a few areas. 

In the end, she’d collapsed, dragged herself out of sight underneath the overhang of one of the buildings and shivered in the dirt.

Shigure found her. 

She could hear him walking, and then he was crouching down. 

“Is someone there?” he’d asked, his voice so easy and calm that Akito immediately trusted in it. She’d felt it, the second he’d come into view: his eyes teared up, and she felt her heart clench with the feeling, with the overwhelming presence of the promise. 

“You’re,” Akito had said, without thinking, “mine.” 

Shigure had blinked; a few tears spilled down his cheeks, but it seemed like he didn’t notice. He reached down, instead, offered Akito a hand as he smiled.

“I am,” Shigure said. Akito didn’t let him pull her up; she’d tugged him down, too, into the dirt underneath one of the houses, and he’d gone easily, like the dirt and the grime and the spider webs didn’t matter to him. Maybe they didn’t matter to him.

“I wanted to meet you,” Akito said. She’d reached out, brushed the cleanest part of her sleeve against the cheek. 

“I’ve waited a long time to meet you,” Shigure said. There wasn’t room for either of them to sit up without smashing against the underside of the engawa, so Shigure just reached out, instead. When he touched her shoulder, Akito felt like crying and couldn’t entirely explain why. 

“They won’t let you see me,” Akito said, quietly. 

“But you’re,” Shigure had started, and Akito had shaken her head so hard that dirt had flung itself up.

“I’m the cat,” Akito said. 

“That isn’t all that you are,” Shigure had replied, and Akito felt something blossom in her chest. It was hope, even if she didn’t know it then: that someone had admitted it, someone had recognized it. Her father whispered it, periodically, that she was special, that there was more to her than met the eye, but her mother would scream at her, would tell her that she was the worst, would demand to know how something so ugly and cursed could come out of her. Akito had never known which one to believe more.

“They still,” Akito said, “won’t let you see me. Not now that my father is dead.”

Shigure’s gaze had softened; he’d reached out and slowly tugged her closer to her. Akito’s breath caught in her chest, her heart going at a thousand beats a minute as she felt him wrap his arms around her. She didn’t transform. 

She’d cried, then, because she’d never been hugged before. The only person who might have wanted to had been wholly unable, and so it was the first time she’d managed to find solace in someone’s arms, to cry so hard her body shook. Shigure had held her, let her muffle her tears against his shirt until one of the maids had finally found them.

Akito couldn’t clearly remember what happened after that, but she remembers being alone in her room and wrapping her arms around herself to remember how it felt for weeks afterwards.

She hadn’t even learned his name.

-

Akito toys, very briefly, with the idea of writing Shigure a letter in her own blood, which sounds sort of delightfully macabre and completely in line with the sort of thing that the Sohma family would do, but she ultimately discards the idea because that wouldn’t solve the whole issue of her not having paper, either.

There’s not really anything she can use. She tries a few things around the house, but there’s nothing portable enough that she could use as paper even when she can get things to leave marks on each other, so she just winds up frustrated with the entire thing. She never thought she’d miss the idea of _homework_ so much, but at least then she’d be able to write.

The boredom was at least a quarter of what made isolation so intolerable, aside from, you know, not being allowed to see anyone, having to deal with her mother, potentially dying in the same room after being there for sixty years…

Yeah. The boredom was definitely a quarter.

“This sucks,” Akito says, for about the sixth time in the past half hour. She’s complaining to no one that can listen, but it still kind of makes her feel better, like yelling a curse word when you hurt yourself even if no one is around. 

The door opens: Akito glances at the small window high up on the wall and realizes it must be time for dinner. 

“Um,” a voice says, and Akito freezes. She can’t place the voice with any immediacy, so she just stares for a moment, slowly sitting up. After a moment, a maid steps in: she looks young, for a Sohma maid, probably only in her mid-30s or so. She has the tray with dinner on it, and she sets it down, awkwardly, but doesn’t immediately leave. 

“...what?” Akito asks, which isn’t the rudest possible thing she could have said but certainly isn’t polite, either. 

“Do you not like natto?” the maid asks, after a moment. 

“...no,” Akito says, the situation only getting more confusing. The maid offers Akito a small smile. 

“Alright,” she says, and then she’s gone. Akito looks down at the side portion of natto still present on the tray, and removes it, as always, staunchly refusing to ruin her rice with the substance, and wonders what that was all about as she chews on a particularly cheap cut of pork used for her dinner.

-

Akito’s next meal does not have natto. There’s all the normal parts of the meal: miso, rice, some chicken, some vegetables on the side, and then -- right where the bowl of natto would usually be -- is a little serving of orange slices, instead, already peeled.

Honestly, it almost feels like a trap, but Akito isn’t going to reject it. She hates natto and has _always_ hated natto, despite her father’s weird affection for the stuff, and as much as everyone has tried to push it on her thanks to him, she’ll gladly eat just about anything else. 

The orange is good. It’s better than most of the food she usually gets, actually; it seems less like it’s the absolute cheapest option and more like it was plucked out of the normal Sohma food stores. 

“Weird,” Akito says, quietly, eating the entirety of the fruit slices before she bothers with the rest of the meal. She’s definitely going to write Shigure about it, when… she’s able to.

-

Akito wasn’t allowed in the banquets, of course. She was the cat, so she was never allowed into them -- that added to the fact that Ren did her best to keep Akito from meeting any of the juunishi meant that she was usually kept to her own rooms for New Years.

She wasn’t really _watched_ , though.

The New Year after Akira died, Akito finally crept out. Not to go to the banquet, but to go closer than she’d dared before. She’d met the dog, after all; felt the truth of their bond as sure as anything. She wanted to see the rest of them, if only from a distance. So she bundled up as best she could and snuck out after midnight, when everything was winding down, when no one was there to even see her. She hovered near the building, feeling the warmth from afar, the snow settling on the him of her kimono until she wondered if she could fade away completely.

Shigure opened the door. 

“Ah,” Akito had said, and moved forward. She still didn’t know his name, and so -- “Dog-san.”

Shigure had looked at her, bemused; he inclined his head for a moment, and then leaned back into the house, making a comment that Akito couldn’t hear. When he stepped out, he closed the door behind him, cutting off the vague sound of quiet celebration.

“It’s Shigure,” Shigure said, stepping over to her. He held his arms out, and Akito hesitated, looking one way and then the other to make sure that she wasn’t going to get him in trouble so quickly -- and then she ran into his arms, pressing against him, letting that feeling between them reverberate out until it was all she could feel.

“Shigure,” Akito repeated. “Shigure. Shigure, did you get in trouble? For staying with me?”

Shigure rolled a shoulder up in a shrug. “Nah,” Shigure said, and then reached down, hefting Akito up in one fell swoop. She latched onto him, uncertain at the idea of not having her feet on the ground. She had so rarely been held and even more rarely been hugged that it felt almost overwhelming, but the steady thrum of the bond between them helped. It felt right, to be in his arms, and Akito leaned in to rest against him, to feel the warmth seep into her skin.

“You’ll get in trouble,” Akito repeated, blandly, because she knew it was true but she didn’t want it to be. She wanted to stay with Shigure; she wanted to stay with the rest of them. She could feel them, on the edge of her awareness, all the ones that had been born: they were separated from her by wood and paper and metal, and none of it was enough. 

“They won’t be able to hide you forever,” Shigure had said, and his voice was so level, so certain, that Akito believed him. “You’re God. You’re not meant to be hidden from us.”

“I want to be with you,” Akito said, burying her face against his shoulder. 

“You will be,” Shigure had said, and Akito believed him. She believed him more than she’d ever believed anything her father had said; more than anything anyone else had ever said up to that moment.

She’d fallen asleep in his arms, and she woke up back in her room. She’d thought, for a long moment, that she’d only managed to get him in trouble again, that they’d been caught at the last minute, but then she saw a scarf next to her, deep green and with that familiar smell of Shigure. She’d wrapped herself up in it as long as she dared, and then hidden it at the very bottom of her dresser, underneath her least worn kimono, stretched out in between layers so that no one would find it unless they went looking. 

It felt like proof of the promise: the old one, that the spirits had made centuries before Akito existed, and the new one, that Shigure had made when he’d rocked her to sleep.

-

It was a lot easier to sleep when Shigure was there, Akito thinks. She doesn’t really separate her days into any sort of coherent sleep schedule anymore, because there isn’t a reason to, so she just dozes, occupies the weird outer fringe of sleeping where she’s constantly plagued by the strangest dreams and wakes up feeling even wearier.

She’s slept with Shigure a handful of times, of course, and she’s had Kureno sleep by her side considerably more than that, and at the end of the day Akito can confidently say that she absolutely, resolutely, completely hates sleeping alone.

In short, it fucking sucks. 

There’s no moon outside; the sky is overcast and dark, and the inside of Akito’s little room is dark, too. She has lights, but she hasn’t bothered lighting them, nothing but old candles and lanterns. The Sohma family has always seemed deadset on refusing to catch up with the modern age, and she’s grown used to sitting in dark rooms. She can see better than normal people, at any rate; the darkness doesn’t particularly bother her.

She reaches out, traces her fingers over the tatami where she’s hidden the letter from Shigure. She’s memorized it by now, and she can hear it in his voice, if she tries: she can hear him speaking to her, telling her he loves her, that he’ll be with her.

It hurts to imagine, because when it’s over she’s left with the reality of the situation, but she does it anyway:

She imagines. It isn’t a future or a past or an alternate present; she doesn’t bother with any of those details. She crafts her mental image of Shigure in the darkness, imagines a room just like the one she’s in, with tatami on the floor and the sound of the wind outside, but she leaves the walls uncrafted, creates no borders or barriers in her mind. It’s easy to overlay him into her half-reality, to remember the smell of him and the feeling of his skin on hers.

She knows what he’d do, because they’ve done it before, and her hands reach down to follow the path he would. To undo the tie of her obi, to let her kimono slip open. She shifts a leg until the fabric moves, her skin being exposed to the warm air, and she imagines that he’s there, that he’s watching. He’d look at her, hungry and dark, with that insufferable smile on his face, and he’d kiss her until she was breathless, until she barely even noticed the way his hands would move on her body. She lets her kimono slide further open, bares her breasts to the empty room like it’s a lover, and shivers at the feeling. The air is like a caress, and she can pretend that it’s him, pretend that it’s the teasing drag of his fingers down her sides, pressing along her skin. 

In a perfect world, she thinks they’d take their time, but this isn’t a perfect world. She doesn’t have the energy for a perfect world right now, so she slides her hand down into her underwear -- she edits it in her mind, pretends it’s more attractive than utilitarian -- and pretends that it’s him, that they don’t have the time to spend. Maybe they’re busy; maybe they have somewhere to be. Akito doesn’t bother to flesh out the fantasy, just focused on letting her own fingers take the role of Shigure’s, to drag down against herself. 

It’s not as good. Of course it isn’t as good, but she can almost pretend. She has the memory of the real thing to layer over it and the promise that it’ll happen again, and so she rubs against her clit the way she thinks he would, slips a finger inside herself and lets her breath out in a shaky exhale. 

The first time they’d had sex, they’d known they didn’t have time to waste; Akito was inexperienced and Shigure wasn’t, and the combination meant that the pace they’d set for themselves bordered on too fast. She’d ached, afterwards, with the feel of him, and he’d pressed kisses down her thighs when she told him that she wanted to keep that ache as a reminder for as long as she could.

Akito aches now, in a different way. She aches for him in a way that her fingers can’t hope to compare to, and her hips move against her hand like she might really be able to create him out of the air if she tries hard enough.

She thinks about his voice, the kind of things he’d say, lewd and low in her ear -- that she was so wet for him, that she was so good for him. She wants to run her nails down his back and she wants to have him kiss her neck until there’s a mark that takes a week to heal, she wants him so deep inside her that she feels like she can’t move. 

She comes. It isn’t great, but it’s still an orgasm, and her breath stutters in her lungs as she tries to hold onto the feeling, the way her insides clench and her nerves light up. She lays there, afraid to move for fear that she’ll ruin what little pleasure she’s managed to carve out of nothingness, and doesn’t let herself stop dreaming about it. She wants to keep the dream going as long as she can, to drift into that half-sleep state and find Shigure waiting for her there, too.

The air grows just cold enough on her bare skin to be uncomfortable, and so Akito finally pulls her robe back around herself, drags her blanket over and wraps into it without bothering to actually pull out the futon. If she wraps herself up tight enough, she can imagine that it’s his arms; if she’s warm enough, she can imagine that it’s him.

-

Akito dreams:

“I love you,” she says, sitting seiza on the floor of a house she’s never seen. The smell of woodsmoke is in the air, and her voice is deep.

“Then why,” the cat says, “do you condemn me?”

“Because you left,” Akito says. 

“I never wanted to leave,” the cat says, and Akito reaches out to touch him but finds only the floor; she turns to look and sees only the walls of the strange house growing closer and closer until they’re pressing in on her. “I wanted you to be free.”

-

Akito falls asleep next to the door, so that when it opens for her food to be delivered to her it slams into her stomach.

“--I’m so sorry!” the maid says, immediately, as Akito sits up, blearily trying to remember why she’d fallen asleep next to the door in the first place. “Are you alright?”

That’s an extremely loaded question, and so Akito just stares at the maid for a long moment. The maid reaches down, offers Akito the tray of food, and Akito accepts it, brain slowly kickstarting back into gear.

“Thank you,” Akito says, a little awkwardly, “for the orange.” She forgets to say she’s okay, but the maid only offers her a smile, instead. There’s no orange today, just sliced cucumbers drizzled with a soy sauce, and Akito sets the tray down.

“It’s not quite as nutritious,” the maid says, a little conspiratorially, “but my daughter hates natto, too.”

Akito blinks hard to keep herself from feeling a single emotion at that. She looks away from the maid; focuses in on the wall and slowly takes in a breath, trying to decide if it’s worth the risk.

It is. 

“Can I ask you for something?” Akito says, quietly.

“Of course,” the maid says, pleasantly, more pleasantly than anyone else bothers. Akito wonders if she knows. There’s no disgust in her eyes -- just sympathy. 

“Just,” Akito says, “a pencil, and some paper.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” the maid says. 

“You can’t tell anyone,” Akito says, a little too harsh. The maid blinks, and then winks. 

“I’ve got it,” the maid says. “Don’t worry! This isn’t my first job.”

Akito feels terrible, automatically, because she’s asking more than this woman knows. Whether she knows about the curse or not -- she must know something, if she’s delivering food like this -- she’s risking the woman’s livelihood and probably her entire memory.

It feels like another selfish act in a long list of things Akito has done. She feels like she might as well give in to it, at this point, but she can’t: if she veers too hard towards self-indulgence she feels like Ren, and there’s no one she wants to be less than that. 

Akito picks the tray of food up again, heading back to the main room of the small house, and the maid bows and leaves. Akito eats the cucumbers first again, crunches down on them and looks out the window and thinks about the weight of the world.

-

Akito can’t remember the first time she realized that her upbringing wasn’t entirely normal. It came as a slow realization across several years, filtering in through the books she had to read for school and the conversations of those around her. Slowly, she realized she was a girl that was raised as a boy; she realized that most mothers loved their children, that most families would never lock anyone away for being cursed.

Most families, of course, weren’t really cursed, but she’d known _that_ from the beginning.

For the most part, after Akira died, Ren ignored Akito: Akito was left to her own devices, in her small set of rooms, shut away from the rest of the Sohma and especially the rest of the juunishi. She interacted with the same handful of maids; she knew Hatori’s father, who always came to tend to her when she would fall ill. 

It all came to a head when she’d hit puberty. Of course Akito had no idea what was _happening_ the first time she’d gotten her period; she’d been too afraid to tell a single person, and it wasn’t until one of the maids realized that the entire situation started to clear up. One of the maids had discreetly taught her how to use pads; they’d told her it was normal and not to worry and especially, definitely, not to mention it to anyone. 

Honestly, Akito thought it was part of being cursed for a solid half a year.

Except eventually, Ren realized. Ren looked at Akito and must have seen a girl on the cusp of womanhood, and instead of any joy in raising her she’d only felt disgust. Akito had felt that same disgust, later, when she was alone in her room and nursing the bruises left behind. Akito hated Ren; she hated herself more than anything; she hated the idea that she’d been born a girl only to have to hate it so much. She hated being the cat, she _especially_ hated being god, she hated everything about her life leading up to that point.

When Kureno had come that night, she’d yelled at him, instead, turned her hatred outwards until her lungs failed her and she fell to her knees. She cried until her head ached, and Kureno still held her through it, ran his fingers through her short hair and rubbed his hand down her back. 

“You don’t have to be what she wants you to be,” Kureno had said, and the enormity of it was too much for Akito. There was an entire world beyond the Sohma estate that she’d never seen -- that she would never see. She couldn’t imagine the idea of going against Ren. She couldn’t imagine the idea of leaving. 

“I can’t be anything else,” Akito had said. _I’m not strong enough_ , she didn’t say, but it was the truth: she wasn’t strong enough, or smart enough, or beautiful enough. Everyone looked at her and saw the wretched cat, the only son of the late heir, sickly and frail, unable to ever take over the family or do anything worthwhile.

“What about,” Kureno said, “what I want you to be?”

Akito had looked at him, then, with her eyes wide, with the idea of it pressing down like a forbidden thought. 

“I don’t know,” she’d said, and buried her face back into Kureno’s chest. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

-

It takes a few days for Akito to get paper, which is fine; she wasn’t expecting it right away. Sneaking anything in to her is a risky move even from someone that’s been raised with the Sohma, so it must be harder for someone like the new maid, who Akito is fairly certain has worked with the outside family but only recently been promoted to the dealings of the inside world.

It’s a shitty promotion, but it probably pays good. 

At any rate: Akito gets the paper and the pencil, eventually. She doesn’t notice it at first, because it’s carefully folded over on itself, flattened and then put inside a tiny bag at the very bottom of her soup. It survives the trip fine, and Akito manages to get it out of the bag without getting soup everywhere, which is an accomplishment. 

There’s a note attached, a scrap of receipt paper that just says: _More to come_ and then a little drawing of a woman giving a thumbs up.

Akito adds the scrap underneath the tatami mat where Shigure’s letter rests, and then hides the rest of the paper there, too, after she unfolds it and flattens it and counts out the sheets she has to work with. 

She gets the pen the next day, taped to the underside of the tray itself on the far edge where it can’t easily be seen. She almost misses it, but she feels it when she goes to set the tray back by the door and pulls it away. She makes sure there’s no tape left on the tray when it’s returned, and then stares at the pen and the paper in her lap and tries to remember a single word she’d wanted to write.

Suddenly, none of it feels good enough. None of it feels -- _enough_. How is she meant to convey her feelings through words? She’s not the one that’s a writer; she hadn’t even been able to read as much as she’d wanted.

She doesn’t want to waste the opportunity, and there’s no telling when Kureno will be back, though -- so she writes. Just a little. Not much. Half a paragraph or so, and then she puts the materials away, flops down on the mat over them and stares back at the ceiling.

“I want to see you,” she tells the ceiling, which, being a ceiling, does not reply. “I want to talk to you.”

-

Akito fills the letter out, over the next several days. She only gets a few more sheets of paper from the maid, but she fills those, too. Her handwriting gets smaller and smaller the more she writes, because once she starts she can’t stop. She fills the pages front and back and then adds more in the margins she’d left the first time through. She tells Shigure everything. She doesn’t bother to try and keep it in a nice, neat letter form: she just writes, as though she were talking, as though he was there with her.

_I want to see you, _she writes.__

__She hides the pages whenever she finishes, the second the ink dries, and she lays on the tatami in the lingering summer heat and imagines she’s at his house, instead._ _

__“What a way to celebrate your birthday,” Ren says, casually, and Akito shoots upright. She’d been caught in thought -- a daydream about a world in which Akito was a professional singer and Shigure wrote her songs, which isn’t anything Akito ever wants to do but it’s something to think about -- and Ren was capable of being quiet, when she wanted to be._ _

__Akito glances up at the window. She hadn’t realized._ _

__“Are you happy?” Ren asks, her voice deceptively calm, and Akito looks down at the pattern of the tatami, lets her nails bite against it so she doesn’t bite against herself. “Now that you’re finally here where you aren’t causing problems.”_ _

__“Yes,” Akito says, automatically. Yes, of course she’s happy, of course she’s happy to suffer in whatever way Ren wants her to. It’s a lie, but there’s truth to it, too: there’s comfort in the familiar, no matter how agonizing, and she feels as bound to Ren as she does to the juunishi, to the Sohma, to this cage._ _

__“Good,” Ren says, a satisfied purr as she swipes a finger across one of the bars and then looks at the filth that accumulates. “Of course, it’s still too nice of a prison for someone like you. You’d be better off to all of us if you were dead.”_ _

__It’s familiar. It’s the same as always. Akito feels her heartbeat kick up into her throat until she can’t swallow, feels her veins turn to an anxious heat that makes her want to seep into the tatami and never return to a human form._ _

__“The cat,” Akito says. Ren looks at her, eyes narrow. Her hair goes down her back and Akito wonders if that’s what she’d look like, if things had been different. “Would be born… again.”_ _

__Ren looks at Akito for a long moment, then looks away._ _

__“But I wouldn’t birthed you,” Ren says. “You wouldn’t have killed your father.”_ _

__Akito does flinch, this time; she wraps her arms around her stomach and digs her nails into her arms. “I didn’t,” Akito tries to say. She feels her mouth move, but no sound comes out, just a harsh breath of air._ _

__“He was _everything_ ,” Ren says. “And you’re nothing. You’re nothing.” _ _

__Ren looks at Akito for a long moment, and then leaves. Akito is sure she should be grateful -- there were no rocks thrown, this time, no bellowed kicks or punches to leave bruises along her body, but in some ways that was easier to deal with._ _

__Akito manages a few minutes to be certain she’s alone, that no one is going to rush in to rescue her or check on her, that Ren has gone for good, and then she lets out a sob. She buries her face into her hands and chokes on the feeling of it._ _

__She didn’t kill her father. She knows that. But there’s that voice inside of her that says she did. Ren’s voice, speaking with more logic than Ren ever does: the stress of raising the cat killed him; he was too weak to suffer such a disappointment. Akito knows she isn’t nothing, she knows she’s important to people, but it’s impossible to believe, when so few people can visit, when it feels like so few people care._ _

__Akito cries, hard enough and loud enough that her head aches well before she’s done. She’s thinking herself in circles, trying to tell herself there’s a purpose to all this while the thought is chased by the feeling that she deserves it. She digs her nails into her sides and tries to think of anything else, tries to focus on a single thing that isn’t where she is and who she is._ _

__She misses Shigure. She wants Hatori. She wants Kureno._ _

__She wants her father. She wants her father to have loved her._ _

__Akito cries until the darkness inside of her overtakes her._ _

____

-

Akito wakes up to a soft touch. Akito moves into it, automatically, reaches out and opens her eyes to Hatori.

“Hatori,” Akito says, and Hatori looks so sad and tired that Akito feels the lump in her throat reform like it never left. “She didn’t--”

“One of the maids,” Hatori says, “called for me. She saw the blood.”

Akito freezes. She looks down, slowly; her kimono is off one shoulder, and she can see the aftermath of what she’d done to herself, the deep crescent wounds and the scratches she’d inflicted in on herself in a desperate bid not to spiral completely into that waiting darkness. 

“I didn’t,” Akito says, weakly, and then trails off. Hatori reaches out, brushes her kimono off her shoulder to get a better look at one of the scratches down the side of her breast; it’s clinical and professional, and Akito feels too numb to care. 

“Let me see your hands,” Hatori says, and Akito holds them out. There’s blood under her nails, and the nails themselves are too long -- or they were; half of them are broken now, ripped in uneven cuts down to the quick. 

“I’m sorry,” Akito says, and doesn’t know quite what she’s apologizing for: her failure to stop Ren, her inability to stop hurting herself. 

“I know,” Hatori says, softly. He’s unpacking his bag again, and Akito holds still when he starts cleaning across the wounds. It stings. She doesn’t remember it hurting when she’d done it. “It’s not uncommon, during times of stress.”

“Oh,” Akito says, vaguely. She can’t imagine other people doing it, but she supposes it’s hard to imagine them in the situation she’s in. Hatori has always been very clear with her that even if she’s cursed, even if she wasn’t god, she’d still have normal human reactions to what she’s been through, which is sort of reassuring in a backwards way. It makes her feel a little like there’s a chance, underneath everything, that all of them could be normal people, one day.

She doesn’t really believe that, but it’s nice to think about. 

“I’m going to bandage these for today,” Hatori says, “but you can take it off tomorrow, once they’ve started to heal over.”

Akito nods, numbly. It’s a lot of bandages, with the amount of ground he has to cover: he wraps around both of her palms, spreads antiseptic across her torso and her rib cage, puts a line of gauze around her arm and bandage at her neck.

“They shouldn’t scar,” Hatori says. 

“I heal fast,” Akito says, like Hatori doesn’t already know that. Like he hasn’t helped make sure her injuries haven’t scarred in the past. Some of them have: a broken arm left a scar at her elbow that’s never healed; there’s a scar along the back of her neck where she had an unfortunate accident with a glass window. For the most part, Ren aims to bruise, and Akito has never set out with the intent to hurt herself, so everything heals.

Well enough, at any rate. 

“Here,” Hatori says, and takes Akito’s hands again. She looks at him, bewildered, as he carefully uses a pad to clean her fingers. He clips her nails back, wraps bandages around the worst nails, the ones where they’ve ripped so poorly that the nail bed is exposed and bleeding. “Does it hurt?”

“Not really,” Akito says. Not compared to everything else. “You’re always cleaning up our messes.”

“You aren’t a mess,” Hatori says, and Akito fixes him with a look.

“You just had to bandage me because I ripped my own skin off,” Akito says. “I believe that qualifies, medically speaking, as a mess.” She pulls her kimono back up, but doesn’t bother to refasten the obi; she doubts anyone else will visit, and she’s still exhausted enough to want to go right back to sleep. 

“Medically speaking,” Hatori says, “as your doctor, it qualifies as a mental health condition presenting due to trauma.”

“You don’t talk about those things in families like ours,” Akito corrects him.

“I do,” Hatori says, and Akito looks at him, and then lets a breath out. 

“Will you,” Akito asks, carefully, “do me a favor?”

“Yes,” Hatori agrees, without even knowing what it is, and Akito feels that lump of guilt again; the feeling that she isn’t worth it, that she’s just manipulating everyone around her as much as Ren does. 

Akito hesitates for a long moment, because this is a burden she shouldn’t be putting on Hatori, but they’re long past any sort of realistic doctor/patient boundaries, and she needs his friendship more than anything else. She reaches down. It’s a struggle to get the tatami up, now that she’s ruined her nails, and after a moment of struggling, Hatori reaches down to help her. Once it’s lifted, she pulls out the letters to Shigure and offers them to Hatori.

“They’re for Shigure,” Akito says. 

Hatori takes them. He looks at them for a long moment. It’s a risk -- but Hatori is important, and even if Ren finds them, she wouldn’t dare hurt him. At worst, he wouldn’t be allowed to attend Akito for awhile. 

“I’ll make sure he gets them,” Hatori says. 

“Hatori,” Akito says. “Did--” The question rots in her mouth before she can ask it. She can’t ask if she was the reason her father died. Of course Hatori would tell her no. Of course he would lie, if he had to. 

“--Did you know it’s my birthday?” Akito says, instead, and Hatori reaches out, allows Akito to curl in and press against him. He’s as comforting as always, warm and strong and familiar, and Akito wants to stay like this for at least six hours. 

“I did,” Hatori says. “Happy birthday, Akito.”

Akito laughs, and it’s a broken, ugly sound, but Hatori holds her until her shoulders stop shaking, and he strokes her hair when she finally lays back down to try to sleep. 

She’s alone again, she thinks, as she hears the door close. She presses a hand over the tatami and lets out a breath of air. 

She’s out of paper again.


	4. Chapter 4

Shigure has exhausted the parts of the Sohma house he has easy access to, and he doesn’t feel like stirring up the kind of trouble that comes with getting the harder records, so he does the next best thing: goes to city hall.

“I’m looking for my family’s registry,” Shigure says, cheerfully, to the woman working at the desk. She looks at him. She’s a little older, her hair greying at the temples, reading glasses perched on her face, but she offers him a smile, after a moment. 

“Was your copy lost?” she asks. She types something into the computer in front of her, and Shigure watches, curiously, because his interaction with computers has been limited despite the insistence of most of his peers that they make writing considerably easier.

“Ahh, my parents and I aren’t talking,” Shigure lies, easily, with a wave of his hand. “They don’t like my girlfriend.” The best lies are rooted in truth, after all. 

“I see,” the woman says, and she’s clearly aiming for a disapproving tone but doesn’t quite manage it. 

“I’m hoping they’ll come around,” Shigure says. “I’m planning to ask her to marry me soon, so I thought I should have a copy handy, just in case.”

“It’s good to plan ahead,” the woman acknowledges. “What’s your name?”

“Sohma Shigure,” Shigure says. He takes the offered pen, jots down the kanji and offers it over to her. She looks back and forth from it to the computer screen a few times as she types it in, and then her eyes widen. 

“That’s quite a large family,” she says.

“It’s very traditional,” Shigure says.

“Is that why they don’t like her? Your girlfriend,” the woman says. She drops her voice a little as someone walks by. “Do you need the entire file? It’ll take awhile to print a copy.”

“If you have the original,” Shigure says, “I can just look through it and find the parts I need.”

The woman considers it, and Shigure is fairly certain he’s pressing the bounds of what her authorization permits.

“They don’t like her because she’s an orphan,” Shigure says, and the woman looks at him with a surprised, sympathetic expression and Shigure knows that he’s got her. “There’s nothing to be gained from marrying her, so I want to prove that there have been others that married for love, even if they claim otherwise.”

“Well,” the woman says, “I don’t know how much the koseki will help with proving that, but come with me and we’ll find it.”

Shigure follows her. It’s not like it’s forbidden: he has as much right to it as anyone else in the family, even if the family is large enough that it must be a complicated mess of papers. Sure enough, she sits him down with the papers, points out the family to him.

“If you’ll just write down which parts you need copies of, I’ll mail them to you,” the woman says, kindly, and Shigure wonders if he should feel more guilt about how easily he manipulated the situation. 

“Thank you,” Shigure says. “You’ve been a wonderful help.” He lets the words come out easy, lightly, and watches the way the woman smiles at him and walks away. He flips through the pages, stops briefly at his own family to doublecheck that it’s all correct -- it is -- and is unsurprised to see that the lie has been kept even on official documents, the clean ink stating that Sohma Akito was born a healthy baby boy. 

That’ll be fun to deal with, someday. 

Then his search takes him back further, and the documents get steadily harder to read. Shigure can manage it all because he’s been reading the Sohma family documents for years, but these are copies of copies of copies of two hundred year old records, and he’s careful with them, looking only for the parts that don’t match up with the records at the estate.

Anyone can look at the official Sohma koseki, but that doesn’t mean that everything is always properly declared. He doesn’t really need copies of any of the sheets, but he writes down a few pages regardless, including his own just to make sure it seems authentic. The woman is helping someone else when he exits, but he offers her a smile and she takes the sheet of paper from him without missing a beat. 

He won’t jump to any conclusions yet. He has time, even if every minute he wastes means another minute Akito is spent by herself in that little room. He doesn’t feel sad about it, but there’s an anger deep in his chest that he uses as fuel, allows it to carry him through the tedium of having gone through every Sohma record he has access to and a few he doesn’t. 

He needs more, though. More than he can get on his own, and that’s _extremely_ annoying.

-

“Haa-san!” Shigure says, pushing the door open gently enough that he won’t be immediately reprimanded for slamming it open. “I’ve come to make sure you haven’t studied yourself into a coma.”

“That’s not how comas work,” Hatori says, and his voice is short and he does look tired. He’s had to deal with all the juunishi emergencies, since his father died, and there’s simply too much pivotal work to trust with outsiders, even the ones at the family hospital. Shigure feels something like sympathy, but there’s only so much he can do. 

“Aha! It was a joke,” Shigure says. “I was testing to make sure you knew how comas worked.”

Hatori looks at Shigure, and Hatori’s grip on the pencil looks more precarious than Shigure likes, so he holds his hands up in mock surrender.

“I’m sorry,” Shigure says. “I needed a favor.” 

“Are you avoiding your editor again?” Hatori asks.

“Well,” Shigure says, “yes, but that isn’t actually the favor.”

“I don’t know how you get anything published,” Hatori says, but he sets his pencil down and turns in his chair to look at Shigure, arms crossed and back straight.

“Charming good looks,” Shigure quips. “I need to see Kureno again.”

Hatori is quiet. It’s a large request: another visit so soon would arouse suspicion in most people. While Ren hardly has all her wits about her, she _does_ have paranoia in droves, and it means that they have to be more careful than they ever would normally so that they don’t alarm her or allow her to make any assumptions.

“Or,” Shigure says, “I need you to get a message to him, privately.”

“That’s easier,” Hatori says, and Shigure smiles, because that’s why he’d offered it as the second option after a nearly impossible first. 

“There’s some documents that are in the main house that I need access to,” Shigure says. He produces a sheet of paper from his sleeve, folded over several times with neat creases. 

Hatori takes the sheet of paper. He doesn’t open it, because that’s incriminating; he just looks at it for a long moment before he slides it into his medical textbook, a few pages from the back.

“Don’t be surprised if he can’t do what you want him to,” Hatori says. “He’s under enough stress as it is.”

“He’ll do it,” Shigure says, and looks at Hatori with all the traces of joking erased from his expression. Shigure leans back against Hatori’s desk. “If it’s to save Akito, he’ll do it, even without the curse binding him.”

Hatori digests this information over. It’s always interesting, to watch how Hatori thinks: both he and Shigure take their time, mull over the information before they give anything back out, but where Shigure does it to be calculating, Hatori does it to be _kind_. As brusque and cold as he appears, Hatori is always concerned with the well-being of others. 

Shigure, of course, is less so, even if hurting people is something he generally tries to avoid.

“He told you?” Hatori says, after a long silence.

“I thought you must have known,” Shigure says. “It was too big a secret for him to keep by himself.”

“I don’t know the details,” Hatori says, and he sounds more tired than he did when Shigure walked in. “Do you remember when Akito broke her arm?”

“Yes,” Shigure says, automatically, because the rage he’d felt then had nearly blinded him. It had caught him so off guard that he’d felt sick, and he’d been sent home from school after he threw up in the bathroom. His plan had formed after that, and he’d been working on it ever since.

“I was worried it was Kureno,” Hatori says. “I pressed her too hard about it, and she told me that his curse had broken, and he was going to stay by her side but pretend that he hated her in order to help shield her from Ren and help protect everyone else.”

“She’s been planning all this for awhile,” Shigure says, with a note of pride in his voice.

“She’s learning from you,” Hatori says, and there’s nothing like praise in his voice about it. He doesn’t sound particularly mad about it, either, which Shigure knows is because anywhere Akito goes from where she is must be a good thing, and Shigure would gladly destroy everyone that’s ever hurt her. 

“Not enough,” Shigure says. “It’s messy, to rely on the idea of Kureno being able to fake something like that.”

“It’s easier for him, apparently,” Hatori says, “now that the curse is broken.”

“It was Ren-san, wasn’t it?” Shigure asks, and Hatori looks at him, unfooled by the abrupt switch in line of questioning.

“Of course it was,” Hatori says, finally, and he puts his elbow on the desk so he can massage at his temples. “I knew it then, but I didn’t want to believe she’d go so far.”

“She’s done worse,” Shigure says. 

Hatori knows. Shigure can see it in him, the defeat that marks the straight line of his back and the tension in his shoulders. Shigure doesn’t press him further, even if he wants to. Shigure wants to press Hatori and Kureno and Ren until they break, until the curse and the Sohma family both crumble before him and he can free Akito from every chain that binds her.

It’s just that breaking Hatori wouldn’t actually help anything, and Shigure knows Hatori must feel even more helpless than Shigure.

“I’ll get this to Kureno,” Hatori says, when it becomes clear that Shigure is actually backing off for once. “It might take awhile.”

“That’s fine,” Shigure says. “I’m getting used to waiting.”

Hatori matches Shigure’s smile when he sees it, even if his is more sad than bitter. They both wish things were going differently, but Shigure was far, far more willing to cause upset if it meant getting things to _change_.

-

Shigure’s editor is waiting for him at his door, her long hair swept carelessly over her shoulder.

“You’re late,” she says.

“I haven’t finished the outline,” Shigure replies. "Wasn't the new editor coming?"

“Show me what you have," Ayumu says. "You can have your new editor when you meet your deadlines."

“Ah, Ayumu-chan, that’s nothing,” Shigure says, with a bright smile. Ayumu looks at him for a long moment, then sighs; the movement moves through her entire body, from her lips to her chest, and Shigure watches.

“You don’t even have a pitch?” Ayumu says. 

“I’ve got writer’s block,” Shigure offers. He steps inside, and Ayumu follows him. He takes off his shoes; she doesn’t, simply closes the door and then leans back against it.

“I’ve got a lot of other authors,” Ayumu says, “and a new girl to train, so I need you to give me more to work with than that.”

“You could bring her along," Shigure says. "I'd be a great person to train with."

“Plot,” Ayumu says. “Now.”

She’s always been no-nonsense about it, which means that she’s rarely any fun. She reminds him a little of Rin, which would be cute if she wasn’t constantly harassing him about his deadlines. On the other hand, he can owe a good deal of his success to her stubborn ways, which has ensured his books are distributed and promoted at a level good enough that he doesn’t need to worry about money.

Shigure looks at her for a long moment.

“I was thinking of writing a book about a cat,” Shigure says.

“A cat,” Ayumu repeats, tonelessly.

“A cat that’s lost its way,” Shigure says. The idea creates itself in his mind as he speaks it, as though he himself was giving it life: he sees it unfold, the automatic parallels to reality slowly forming into a vague semblance of a plot. 

“So who finds it?” Ayumu asks.

“No one,” Shigure says. “He has to find his own way. It wouldn’t be his if he didn’t. Ah, but in the end he’ll find someone to stay with, of course.”

Ayumu digests this for a long moment. Her face doesn’t change as she thinks about it, chews it over.

“Get me an outline by Friday,” Ayumu says. “It sounds like it could work, if you’re going for more abstract themes.”

“The theme,” Shigure says, letting his hand brush out into the air in a gesture that’s a much more subdued imitation of Ayame, “is learning to be worthy of love.”

Ayumu snorts. “I don’t think that’s the kind of thing anyone should learn from you,” she says, “but write it, and we’ll see.”

“I’ll do my best,” Shigure says, which is the truth: he puts enough effort in to writing that it probably qualifies as something close to his best, even if it’s nowhere near his passion or his undivided attention.

“Friday,” Ayumu repeats, and then lets herself out.

Shigure sighs once the door is closed. “A cat, huh,” he murmurs to himself, deeply grateful that Ayumu knows nothing of the curse and can’t tell how transparent that was. 

Well. It’ll be something to write to Akito about, he supposes.

-

Shigure’s writer’s block does not instantly clear, but he does make an outline. He coaches it in his mind in a different way: it’s a book for Akito. She’ll hate it, of course, because she always hates when she can see herself too clearly in stories, but if he writes it for her it gives him more motivation than he’d feel otherwise.

Writing is fine, but it’s a job like any other; he does it to make money and to survive in the outside world now that he’s detaching from the Sohma finances. He’ll just as easily discard it one day, to do something else when it’s more convenient. He doesn’t talk about that often, because most of his peers write for reasons like passion and creativity, and Shigure writes because he’s always liked reading.

He likes the worlds that stories create. He likes the options and the opportunities, and he likes to look at characters and situations and think what he would do, to learn from their fictional mistakes. It’s a fun exercise, but he’s never felt the need to tell stories to other people.

Except for Akito. 

He told her stories he’d read, when he was young enough that he didn’t have enough stories of his own; he’d told her stories of his own when he started making them up. She listened to all of them, read the ones he’d written down. She’d kept them longer than he had. Shigure didn’t know that he had any of the ones he’d written when he was a teenager, but she’d kept every letter, despite the fact that Shigure is certain Ren would have burned them if she’d found them. 

Shigure’s computer chimes. He looks at it, a little startled, and he opens his email expecting it to be some sort of useless notification he doesn’t care about. It’s from an email he doesn’t recognize, but it’s from the Sohma domain, and he knows exactly who it must be because the amount of people allowed access to the Sohma emails who can actually _use_ them…

Kureno’s email is short, which is good: he simply tells Shigure that he’s found some of the documents and to expect more of them later. There are several pages attached, and Shigure sets them to download and goes to make himself some tea. They’re ready by the time he gets back, scanned in pages that are yellowed with age even on the monitor screen.

Shigure opens the notebook he’s been using to keep notes on the situation. He could do it all in his head, if he wanted, but there’s something about writing it down that makes it easier to see the patterns, sometimes. The information still isn’t quite complete, but it’s getting there: the names and dates and descriptions of several juunishi, going as far back as he can.

He thinks he knows how to break the curse, thanks to Akito.

-

Ayame invites Shigure over to dinner, and Shigure accepts, because it’s better than sitting at his desk trying to write and instead staring at the computer as it makes no noise and receives no further emails.

“Gure-san!” Ayame says, the instant Shigure steps into the apartment above the shop. “It’s been too long!” 

“Aaya!” Shigure offers, in return, reaching out to deftly grab Ayame’s hand midair. “Don’t worry, they say that longing only makes love stronger!”

“Ah, then I will make you long for me all night!” Ayame says. 

Laughter interrupts Shigure’s response, and he’s not surprised to see a girl there, laughing so hard she’s wiping tears from her eyes. He’s not exactly surprised that she’s in a maid outfit, either, because that is the sort of girl that Ayame would find to date -- but he _is_ surprised that she so comfortably steps forward, offering Shigure a bright smile.

“I’m Mine,” she offers. “If you’re going to keep each other up all night, then I’ll have to go home to get some sleep!”

“Oh no,” Ayame says, immediately, and Shigure feels something warm in his chest reflected in the way Ayame looks down at Mine. He looks at her like he’s found something he’s been missing for years. Shigure is glad. “That wouldn’t do, of course. Gure-san, my apologies, but our reunion will have to wait.”

“I’ll wait for you forever, Aaya,” Shigure declares with a grandiose gesture, and Mine laughs again. She doesn’t seemed threatened by it at all, seems to take it all in stride. 

“We ordered in,” Mine says, and waves Shigure in to the living room. It’s half-traditional and half-modern, a helpless mishmash of items that Shigure can clearly sort into Ayame’s belongings and Mine’s belongings. Ignoring that, there’s fabric everywhere, sewing needles and sketches and everything else strewn across the house. There’s some sort of order to the chaos, and Shigure can tell that an effort to clean the room was made: there are places to sit and places to eat, and the kotatsu and couch are both free.

“I was looking forward to a homecooked meal,” Shigure sighs, wistfully.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Mine says, chipper and unphased, “but Tenchou burns water and I’m only good at _dressing_ like a maid.”

“You do make a very cute maid, Mine-san,” Shigure says, and Mine beams at him.

“ _Doesn’t she_?” Ayame interjects, proudly, spinning over to put a hand on Mine’s shoulder. “It’s my design, of course, but she helped sew it and we’re considering making a second version but with more lace here--” Ayame’s touch is casual when it happens, his fingers glossing over the fabric at her thigh to indicate where the alterations might occur. It lifts her skirt to a level that would be scandalous, if it was anyone else, but Mine simply smiles through it, and Ayame continues to explain it before he drops the fabric again.

It’s such a casual, domestic thing, so full of trust and confidence, and Shigure feels jealousy and happiness in equal parts. He knows with complete certainty that Mine must already know about the curse; she’s careful to curve her body away from Ayame’s chest, to keep them from closing the final few inches between each other.

Shigure thinks they’ll get married, someday. They might have already, if it weren’t for Ren. Even she couldn’t keep the force of nature that was Ayame caged within the Sohma estate, but she can certainly keep him from marrying -- and given that Mine has been kept something of a secret, even Ayame is aware of that.

“So,” Mine says, when they’ve all sat down, “do you have any embarrassing stories about Tenchou? He said you’ve been friends since you were born.”

“It’s true, we were practically friends in the womb,” Ayame says, “but I assure you I have never done anything embarrassing in my entire life. Not once.” He looks at Shigure, pointedly, and Shigure grins.

“Aaya doesn’t feel things like shame or embarrassment,” Shigure says, confidently, “but I do have some _great_ stories.”

“Hm,” Ayame says, with a look on his face like introducing the two of them might have been a mistake. Shigure knows it isn’t real, because there’s nothing Ayame wants more than to be able to find happiness, to share it with those he loves, to love despite everything else. 

“Tell me,” Mine says, and leans forward conspiratorially.

-

Shigure stays later than any of them should be up, given that Mine and Ayame have a business to run, and he waves off their offers to get him a cab.

“The walk will clear my head,” Shigure says, and offers them a smile. They both wave, shoulder to shoulder, and when the door closes he can still hear Mine’s laughter, Ayame’s voice murmuring something. 

Shigure allows himself a brief moment to imagine that kind of a life with Akito. It isn’t an abstract, to him; they’ve both stated their love, despite her attempts to drive him away, and he has every intention of getting there. It’s just that Ayame has it _now_ , and Shigure feels like time is steadily ticking away.

He’s never been so impatient before in his life,

By the time he gets home, he’s fortunate enough to find another email from Kureno, and it doesn’t have quite all the documents he needs but it has enough to ground his theory.

Shigure looks over his notes to make sure he’s remembering everything properly -- and he is.

The thing about the curse is that it’s been around so long a lot of the information is forgotten, but that doesn’t mean it was never recorded. It’s never happened before that god has been born in an error like this, but there _have_ been errors: a woman gave birth to a set of twins, once, and one was born stillborn and the other alive and cursed with the rabbit spirit, but the one that lived was dark-haired and dark-eyed while the other was the one with the typical blond hair. The physical traits are one of the immutable aspects of the curse, and while they vary in how _how_ they overpower genetics, it’s never been that a child cursed by a spirit would be born with none of the characteristics.

Unless there’s an error, such as with the rabbit, or with Akito.

Akito still looks like she did when Shigure dreamed of her. Sure, her hair is shorter, and he thinks the malnourishment took a toll on her figure, but everything else matches up, the shape of her face and the color of her hair and the grey of her eyes. She doesn’t _look_ like the cat. 

Historically, the cat is orange. There’s a few pictures: the previous cat lived close enough to the current generation that photographs exist of him, hidden away in files that no one wants to touch, and his hair is bright enough that it overtakes the rest of the photo, blows it out into sepia. The descriptions of cats throughout the family are similar, if denigrating: they talk of hair like fire, of the most cursed demon, of orange hair and orange eyes and a short temper.

Well. The last part certainly fits, if nothing else.

So, Shigure’s theory is thus:

For whatever reason, Akito was never meant to be the cat. She was meant to be god, and then something happened -- perhaps there was another woman pregnant at the same time as Ren who had a miscarriage. Perhaps there was a stillbirth. Perhaps it’s something else entirely that Shigure doesn’t have records of, but he’s going to narrow it down, because if he can figure out why she became the cat, then he’s that much closer to breaking the entire thing down.

-

Shigure goes to see Hatori again. He announces himself, this time, calls ahead to make sure Hatori isn’t going to get in trouble, and he’s cleared for a visit. He steps inside and toes off his shoes, and before he can make it the whole way inside Rin is there, reaching her hands out for him. Shigure wraps his arms around her, automatically, then looks at Hatori.

“She’s here for a check up,” Hatori says, by way of explanation. “She decided to stay, when she realized you were coming.”

“Didn’t want to go home?” Shigure asks, and Rin shakes her head. Her hair is braided back, for the moment; Shigure knows it’s to keep it out of the way when she’s in the middle of medical examinations, so he reaches down to snag the hair tie and let it it roll across her shoulders. 

“Ren won’t approve of her being housed anywhere else,” Hatori says, and he sounds tired by it. It’s a heavy burden, to watch the injuries the juunishi pick up and be unable to treat the root cause of it. Abuse is the real curse of the Sohma family, but that’s a curse that Shigure doesn’t think can be broken so easily, because abuse isn’t caused by things like gods and magic.

“It’s fine,” Rin says. “I just have to wait until they aren’t mad.”

Shigure sits down, and Rin goes with him. She’s too thin. It reminds him of Akito. 

“Even if they’re mad,” Shigure says, “they shouldn’t take it out on you, you know.” 

Rin doesn’t reply. She presses her head against Shigure’s arm and holds onto him, and Shigure doesn’t have Hatori’s medical training but he understands trauma and abuse. He doesn’t press any further, because he knows it’ll damage her. Rin is as strong as Akito is, but they’ve both been broken down over the years, and Shigure is certain that the words “it isn’t your fault” ring equally hollow to them both.

So he doesn’t say them, just opens his arms so Rin can curl against the chest of someone she trusts to never hurt her. She doesn’t sleep easily, Shigure knows, and she’s tense through every muscle, but she relaxes a little when Shigure pets down her hair.

“Is it alright if I ask Haa-san about your injuries?” Shigure asks. It isn’t that he’s above going behind her back, but he thinks it’s important for her to hear it in Hatori’s impartial tone, and moreover, to have someone _else_ hear it. Shigure isn’t afraid of Rin’s parents, but he also knows he can’t move against them without inciting Ren’s anger.

He’s got to start making a list of the amount of people he wants to get revenge on. 

“I don’t care,” Rin replies, tonelessly.

Hatori doesn’t say anything for a moment. He finishes writing on the sheet of paper, which Shigure imagines is Rin’s chart, before he turns his attention to Shigure. His gaze flickers briefly to Rin -- probably deciding whether or not the discussion is a good idea -- but Hatori simply inhales carefully.

“Outwardly, it’s mostly bruising,” Hatori says. “Largely contained to areas that are easy to hide. The back, the abdomen, the upper thighs. Inwardly, she’s developed ulcers from the stress, the stress has started affecting her hormones, her vitamin levels are dangerously low, and she’s more anemic than almost anyone I’ve seen.” 

Shigure knows the “almost” refers to Akito, because he remembers the time Ren had decided throwing her child through a window was a great idea and the amount of time it had taken Akito to recover from the blood loss. 

“You’re not eating?” Shigure asks, gently, taking care to make sure his voice doesn’t sound accusing.

“Nothing tastes good,” Rin says, and she sounds a little like the child she is. All of the juunishi are too old for their ages, whether from the trauma of their lives or the ancient spirits inside of them, and Shigure doesn’t waste time wishing it could be different. 

“Her parents refuse to allow her non-emergency medical care off the estate,” Hatori says, slowly.

“You can say they tried to get rid of me,” Rin says, and her voice loses all inflection. “I was there.” 

“Ren won’t allow it,” Shigure says. “Right?”

Hatori is quiet for a moment again, because they’re treading too close to mutiny again -- but this room is full of people with secrets and loyalties that aren’t to Ren. 

“If Ren had to raise a child like the cat, then she wants everyone else to suffer as she thinks she did,” Hatori says.

“Did she,” Rin says, very slowly, like the words are hard for her to form, “hurt the cat like this, too?”

This time the silence drags out. 

“Yes,” Shigure says, because Hatori doesn’t seem able to get the words out. “She hurt Akito-san very badly.”

“It must be even worse for the cat,” Rin murmurs. She doesn’t sound particularly broken up about it, but Shigure doesn’t think it’s a lack of empathy so much as the fact that Rin’s world is small and her reality is hard. She can’t change her situation, and she understands that Akito can’t, either, so she just accepts it.

“Rin?” 

Hatsuharu pokes his head in, and Rin stirs from where she was on Shigure’s chest. 

“Haa-kun,” Shigure greets, cheerfully, and Hatsuharu steps in. 

“Hey,” he offers. He’s grown, and he’s growing more everytime Shigure sees him. Rin stands, slowly, and now that Shigure is looking he can see the fragility of her movements. Everything is slow and careful, like if she moves too fast she’ll fall apart. “Mom said you can stay the night.”

Rin looks uncertain.

“She’ll take the heat,” Hatsuharu says. 

“Go with Haa-kun,” Shigure offers, and Hatsuharu looks at Shigure. He doesn’t smile, but he nods, taking Rin’s hand in his.

“Yeah,” Hatsuharu says, and Rin mumbles something that Shigure can’t hear but goes with him anyway. The two of them leave, Hatsuharu’s hand still in Rin’s, and Shigure sighs once the door is closed again.

“I shouldn’t say I’m glad they’re happy, under the circumstances,” Shigure says. 

“No, I understand,” Hatori says. “I’m glad they have each other, if nothing else.”

Neither of them say it: that it’s a similar situation to Akito, except Akito was denied whatever small support structure Rin has managed to hold onto. Rin has Hatori and Shigure, she has Hatsuharu. Hiro seems to get along with her, which is surprising, but counts as a good thing; Kagura has been determined to befriend Rin despite Rin’s best efforts to the contrary.

“What is it you came here for?” Hatori says, after a moment.

“I’ve been researching the curse,” Shigure says, deceptively lightly. “Did you know that we’re always born with the traits of our spirits?”

“You’re talking about our appearances?” Hatori asks.

“Well, you don’t look like a dragon,” Shigure admits, “but every dragon has had your eyes.”

Hatori blinks. “It makes sense,” Hatori says. “I don’t know if I like where you’re going with this.”

“The snake is always born with silver hair, and so on,” Shigure says with a wave of his hand. “What do you think the cat looks like?”

“From the look on your face, I’m guessing the answer isn’t black hair,” Hatori says.

“Orange hair, orange eyes,” Shigure says, with a shrug of his shoulder. “Akito turns into a black cat, but it’s been orange for every other cat as far back as the records go.”

Hatori is quiet as he considers this. He crosses on leg, tapping his finger on the desk. “We knew it was fragile,” Hatori says. “Are you sure it isn’t the same thing that has been changing our forms?”

“It could be,” Shigure admits, “but that’s why I need you.”

Hatori looks deeply uncertain about this prospect, which is fair, because if it wasn’t Sohma family affairs it would be deeply illegal on multiple counts.

“I need to know if there’s anyone in the family that has orange hair or orange eyes,” Shigure says. “That was born after Akito.”

“I don’t actually have a catalogue of every Sohma on the compound,” Hatori says, sounding exasperated. “You know most that live on the outside have actual, licensed doctors to go to.”

“I know,” Shigure says. “There’s no guarantee they even live on the estate, but it’s start, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” Hatori asks. He stands up, and he rifles through one of the filing cabinets. “I don’t pay much attention to hair color.”

“Orange is very distinct,” Shigure offers.

“Your hatred for Kureno is not actually contagious,” Hatori says.

“He’s more of an auburn,” Shigure says, considering it over, arms crossed and a finger taping at his chin. “From the descriptions, we’re looking for more of a fire sort of color.”

Hatori shuts the cabinet after another moment.

“I don’t know anyone off the top of my head,” he says, “but even if you find them, what are you going to do?”

Shigure shrugs a shoulder up. “I’m not sure,” he admits. “But knowing is half the battle.”

Hatori gazes at Shigure for a long moment, leaning back against the filing cabinet. 

“You really don’t care if you have to ruin someone’s life to get her out, do you?” Hatori asks.

“Ah, that’s mean,” Shigure says. He looks away. “I care. It isn’t like I don’t feel guilty about it, sometimes. But if she’s free, then so much could change.”

“There’s no guarantee it’ll change for the better,” Hatori says, gently.

“Would you rather they stay the same? With Rin-chan getting beat every night for having the audacity to go home, and Akito locked away, and everyone miserable?” Shigure asks. He feels bad for it almost immediately, because Hatori also looks away. There’s clear guilt in his expression. “If lives have to be ruined, then I’ll be the one to do it. There’s no point in dirtying the hands of someone as nice as you.”

“I’m not that nice,” Hatori says, almost automatically.

“Don’t discredit yourself,” Shigure says. “The fact that you’re nice is why you haven’t been able to move against Ren yet. I’m willing to hurt everyone -- Akito included -- if it means getting what I want.”

Hatori sighs, and he looks older than he is. He should be focusing on medical school or finding a girlfriend or any of the number of things that normal people did in their mid-20s, not having to deal with the drama of the Sohma family. But that was what the curse was, in its own way -- to be dragged into this world, kicking and screaming, and then to be unable to leave it.

Shigure doesn’t lie to himself. He couldn’t leave Akito anymore than the rest of them could leave the family, because to them, to the half-dozen who have never met “god”, the family is as close to god as they’ll ever get. 

If he were more gracious, he’d consider himself lucky. At least he’s had her; at least he’s held her in his arms. At least he’s heard her say “I love you”, even if it was a choked out cry that he wants to wash out of her reality, paint over with a world where she feels like she belongs. 

“I can’t stop you,” Hatori says. “More than that, I don’t know that I want to.” 

“Well,” Shigure says, “I’ll be sure to keep you updated.”

“Don’t do that,” Hatori says, but it’s a fake complaint and Shigure knows it. Hatori is already too far in this game; it’s all too dangerous for him to do anything but choose sides and hope he doesn’t get caught. 

Hatori steps back over to his desk, and removes a small set of papers. “Here,” he says, offering it over to Shigure. “I didn’t want to give them to you with the kids here.”

Shigure accepts them. He sees Akito’s handwriting, the lazy way she writes his name, all hard lines that trail off before they should.

“If you want to read them here, and write a response,” Hatori says, “I won’t stop you.”

“Are you delivering them now, Haa-san?” Shigure asks, deceptively lightly, because this is a matter that means quite a lot to him, actually.

“Kureno can’t do it alone,” Hatori says. “And none of us want to involve the maids.”

Shigure absorbs this. Truthfully, he has half a letter already written, and he’d brought it with him on the off-chance that he saw Kureno, so the idea isn’t too farfetched.

He unfolds the letters, and reads. 

Akito’s letter starts off coherent and then gets steadily more disjointed. It’s a normal letter that turns into a stream of consciousness, and she drops lines here and there, doesn’t quite connect the letters the way she should, like she couldn’t slow down once she’d started. Shigure has seen writers write so fast that it seemed they would die if they stopped, like it was the only way they could get air. He’s never felt that, of course -- he writes for money and for entertainment -- but he thinks Akito might have all the passion that he lacks.

Akito talks to him about everything. She complains about the oppressive heat of summer, complains about being restless in the night and tired during the day. She asks how he’s doing, how the juunishi are doing. She asks what he ate at the restaurant he’d gone to. She talks about the clouds, and then, when the levy inside her breaks: she tells him that she misses him, that she loves him, that she thinks about his voice and that she hates being alone. She wants to see him, she wants to meet everyone, and she hopes that one day she’ll be able to leave and rejoin everyone but she doesn’t know if she’ll--

She scratches out the entire sentence, but Shigure still understands it. Akito doesn’t know if she’ll survive that long. Someone who spent so much of her life being alone up to now and all it’s taught her is that she hates it. She can endure it, but the circumstances keep getting worse.

Shigure mentally moves his timeline up.

“How is she?” Hatori asks, once he folds he notes back up.

“Terrible,” Shigure says, “but I’m sure you already knew that.”

Hatori nods. “I see her as often as I can, but it isn’t much.” 

“There’s blood on the paper,” Shigure observes. He keeps his tone carefully metered out, doesn’t let any of his emotions flicker into his voice.

“Ren,” Hatori says, “visited, for her birthday. I think Akito had a panic attack, or some sort of flashback.”

“Ren hurt her?” Shigure surmises, and Hatori shakes his head.

“Akito hurt herself,” Hatori says, and Shigure feels something thick and rotten in his stomach flip over, spread out through his veins until his mind is nothing but smoke. He breathes through it, raises a hand and looks away and doesn’t trust himself to reply. “I think it was the only way she knew to keep herself grounded.”

“Without Kureno,” Shigure says, softly. He doesn’t want to feel anything like gratitude to Kureno, but he understands their relationship better now. He’d thought it would be odd that Akito would cling to him so hard, thought it strange that any member of the juunishi could hate her -- but if it was a carefully crafted lie to appease Ren, then it meant Kureno would be left to pick up the pieces of Akito after every encounter with Ren. 

Akito, for all that she was lonely, had never been as alone in the same sense, and Shigure wonders if she had truly managed to prepare for that reality. 

“It’s not uncommon,” Hatori says, clinically, like he’s reciting from a textbook. “Psychologically speaking. I don’t think it was a conscious decision.”

Shigure breathes through the acrid feeling in his throat. There’s a war inside of him, and he understands the necessity in moving slowly in all things, but all he can think is that if he’d moved quicker with this, if he’d been able to do things before she’d ever been locked up, if she hadn’t been so fucking stubborn in the first place --

But that isn’t where they’re at, and Shigure isn’t in the habit of ignoring reality. 

“Dear Akito,” Shigure says, to the air, with a flourish of his pen, “please be certain not to hurt yourself when you have someone here more than willing to do it for you--”

“Do not,” Hatori says, “teach her about that kind of thing.”

“It’s far too late for that, Haa-san,” Shigure quips, which is only half a lie, because his explorations with Akito have been reasonably reserved given the lack of time they’d have together, but have hardly been uneducational. 

“Write your letter and go,” Hatori says, and Shigure does just that.

-

Shigure is at the gate when he sees it. Hatori hasn’t walked him out, and so Shigure had shown himself out, keeping to the back paths for the sake of avoiding Ren and her loyal followers. He gets to the gate as a smaller group of the Sohma kids are getting home -- Kagura and Yuki among them, with a boy with bright orange hair.

“Bye, Kyou-kun!” Kagura offers with a wave, and Kyou offers her a wave and no smile. Yuki glances at Shigure and offers him a smile. 

“Out having fun?” Shigure asks. 

“Martial arts,” Yuki replies. He looks a little healthier, these days; his mother’s neglect has always weighed heavy on Yuki, but since Ayame has stepped in for a more active role, it’s started to help out. Shigure thinks Hatsuharu is the reason he’s taking martial arts now, and it’s certainly helped his color. Shigure does the math in his head: Yuki should start highschool soon, he thinks, if he hasn't already. 

“With your friend?” Shigure asks, nodding his head in the direction that Kyou went.

“Mm,” Kagura says. “Shihan says he’s ‘working through’ some things." 

“Aren’t we all?” Shigure asks, with a small shrug, and Kagura laughs. 

“Tell niisan I said hi,” Yuki says, as Kagura grabs at Yuki’s hand to drag him away. 

“I will,” Shigure promises. Shigure waits until they’re out of sight before he lets out the breath he was holding. “Kyou, huh?”

The cracks that started when all of them gathered are just getting bigger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> before you ask: mitchan is coming, shigure just got himself established earlier than in canon so... different editor... thanks for coming to my "fruits basket timelines are whack" ted talk


	5. Chapter 5

Akito remembers what it felt like to die. 

She hadn’t, of course, but it had felt like she was going to. She can’t remember what the argument was about anymore, but she knows she’d made the mistake of talking back to Ren. She’d anticipated a slap, or a shove, or maybe to be hit with some sort of improvised weapon. She hadn’t expected Ren to grab her by the shoulders and shake her hard enough that Akito couldn’t process any of the words being screamed at her. 

Ren had thrown her face-first into the glass of the window, and it didn’t matter that it was on the ground floor, because the fall wasn’t the problem so much as the sharp edges that seared through Akito’s clothing like it might not even be there.

Ren had watched her fall, and then walked away, her steps silent. 

Akito remembers picking the glass out of the back of her neck and regretting it almost instantly, because her hand came away so red that it made her even dizzier. Akito forced herself to stand, and tried to walk: Hatori’s father would help her, she was certain. 

She’d fallen. She’d hit the ground somewhere around one of the decorative rock gardens, and she remembers watching her own blood slowly stain the stones and thinking that Ren would be more furious with her for that. She was cold, and she was tired, and she’d closed her eyes against the feeling.

She’d rest, and then she’d get back up to go to get help. She’d just rest for a minute.

-

Akito wakes up from the dream and reaches back to touch the scar on her neck automatically. It’s a thin raised line along her skin, and she can still feel it under her fingers, trace it gently. She remembers how it felt when it happened.

It had turned out that she should have stayed where she’d been pushed originally, because moving meant that people had to follow the literal trail of blood to find her, and it had put her closer to death than anyone except Ren wanted. Akito had woken up in her room, a day later and considerably weaker, and was gently scolded for her “carelessness” in falling through the window.

Akito wondered if Hatori’s father knew and just didn’t care, or if he was just really dumb when it came to anything that wasn’t medicine. It was hard to say. Hatori had been there too, though, training even then, and he’d waited until his father had left to slip her a handful of painkillers and tell her to take two every six hours. 

It had been one of the first kindnesses Hatori had been able to show to her. She’d taken one pill to take the edge off and hoarded the rest for months until Kureno found out, and then he’d helped get her a slightly more steady supply of them, smuggling over the counter painkillers into her room like they were high level narcotics just so she could get some sleep after her encounters with Ren. 

At least, Akito supposes, Ren hasn’t seemed to want to actively beat her again, which is a nice change of pace. Not that Ren needs to, apparently -- Akito traces her fingers across one of the bandages she still has over one of the gouges she’d put into her own arms. Most of them had been fine to remove, but one had been persistent about healing, and so she’s been keeping it covered and slathered in ointment and hopes that it’s the right thing to be doing. 

She can’t exactly ask Hatori. 

Akito wonders. About the past cats. She knows they’d been allowed more visitors; she knows that the previous cat had a child and a grandchild after that. Is it just her, that carries this level of curse? To desecrate something as sacred as the “god” with the monster that’s the cat -- she wonders if it really _is_ her fault.

She catches herself pushing down on the bandage, hard enough that her fingertips hurt, and she removes her hand. She tries to take a breath, but it feels ridiculous. There’s nothing to calm down over. There’s no one to fear but herself and the things she’s done and is doing.

Akito leans back against the wall and wonders how much of this she deserves.

-

Akito wasn’t allowed to visit Akira’s grave, so she made her own shrine to him. She didn’t have anything of his, and she didn’t have any photos, so she found a place in the corner of the estate where no one went, a dusty lower shelf in an unused room, and she put things she thought he might have liked there.

He’d always tolerated her. Akito had thought that he had loved her, for a time, but it seemed like she was a means to an end -- Akira had held onto the belief that Akito was special as firmly as Ren had rejected it, and all of Akito’s desire for Akira to be right had died with him. If she had been special, he wouldn’t have died, she thought. 

That was probably when Akito truly understood what it meant to be cursed. 

Her life had always been a small world, but Akira had been central to it. Without him, it started to collapse in on itself. Ren was absent, and the maids were present only enough to make sure that Akito wasn’t killing herself or getting into trouble. Past that, she was left alone. More than that, the loneliness was insistently pressed upon her.

Akito had her own small set of rooms, as far away from Ren as she could be placed. She was allowed in them and in the immediate courtyard. That was it. There were high fences and locked doors, and Akito grew used to the idea that there was no help or company to come for her.

Then she’d emerged, dusty, from the store room -- the door was broken, and she could access it if she wiggled through -- and saw someone else.

“Akito,” the boy said, and Akito felt like she might explode. She lurched forward, because she couldn’t bear the idea of seeing him cry, and he’d put his arms around her automatically. Like he should. Like she wanted.

“I wanted to meet you,” Akito said. 

“I’m,” the boy said, “Kureno. Shigure-niisan told me about you.”

“Shigure,” Akito repeated. Shigure, who she’d seen twice and who had imprinted himself so heavily on her mind already; Shigure who had given her a gift and held her close and made the whispers in her mind grow heavy enough to stop. “How did you get in here?”

“There’s a way in and out,” Kureno said, quietly. “He said to tell you. He’s too big to fit. I barely made it through.”

“A way,” Akito said, “out?”

“Yes,” Kureno had said. “It doesn’t go far, but -- we wanted to see you. I wanted to meet you.”

Akito had felt herself choking on the thought, on the feeling. She clung harder to Kureno.

“I’m scared,” Akito said, and Kureno lifted her up. 

“I’ll show you,” Kureno said.

He’d taken Akito to the hole, which was big enough for Kureno to make it through but only just -- he had to shift his hips awkwardly, and he still caught on the stone. It was easier for Akito, and when she had pressed herself through, put her palms on the dirt and looked up, she’d seen Shigure there waiting for her and she’d started crying automatically. It felt like seeing him for the first time all over again: that relief, that promise sprinting through her veins.

“Is that how you’re going to greet me?” Shigure had said, and he’d reached down, lifted her up, dust and dirty palms and all, and she’d buried her face into his neck and cried. 

She hadn’t stayed long, the first time. She’d been too afraid to be out long, in case the maids came looking -- even though they never did. She’d wiggled back through the hole, but she’d done it with a new gift: Shigure had given her the book he’d been reading, even though she didn’t think she was able to read it. It was too far above her level, but it didn’t matter. 

It didn’t matter, because he’d given it to her.

-

“I wanted to meet you,” Akito murmurs, holding onto the memory. It sounds stupid, now, when even after everything she’s managed to meet so _few_ of the juunishi. Of _her_ juunishi, she thinks, almost savagely: the one thing she should be allowed to have, even if they hate her. Even if they despise her, she should be allowed to meet them. They should be allowed to choose for themselves.

Shigure and Kureno told her all about them. She knows their names and their ages and their animals, she knows Ayame’s fashion sense and Hatsuharu’s personality quirks and that Yuki has a constitution worse than hers. She knows all about them, but all they know about her is that she’s the cat -- wicked and grotesque and locked away for the sin of being born to Akira; of killing Akira.

“I want to meet you,” Akito says, again.

“Talking to yourself? You’ve barely been alone a few months.”

Akito sits up with a snap to look at the maid, her stern face in a frown as she gazes down at Akito. It’s only once she sees her that she reaches up to touch the back of her head -- her hair _has_ grown, and she should have expected this. Akito has no privacy and no rights, and she never has, so she’s learned to anticipate things happening with a growing, uncertain anxiety based on external clues.

She should have been paying more attention to her hair. 

Akito shifts, because she isn’t certain she’s pressed the tatami mat back down far enough, and turns her back to the woman. 

“And yet you’ve nothing to say when people speak to you,” the maid says. Akito just shifts as the maid moves her, staring straight forward at the wall as the maid moves to cut her hair back down to the same length.

“People don’t usually want me to reply,” Akito says, quietly. She isn’t afraid of the maid, but she doesn’t want to provoke her, either. Akito doesn’t think the maid would hurt her, but she could easily whisper into Ren’s ear, and Akito’s stomach curls with the thought of seeing Ren again so soon. 

Akito is fairly certain the only person she hates more than herself is Ren, but the position is volatile. 

“People like to hear themselves talk,” the maid says, her voice as crisp as the sound of the scissors. Akito can feel her hair start to stick to the back of her neck, to the collar of her kimono, and she hates the feel of it. 

“I wanted,” Akito says, “to make sure I still had a voice.”

“That’s ridiculous,” the woman says. “No one has ever lost their voice from mere disuse.” 

Akito is unconvinced, but still feels chastised enough to drop it. There’s no further conversation until the woman stands, until Akito can reach up and run her fingers through the back of her hair and the long bangs to the side of her face. Everything is back to order, just the way Ren likes it, and Akito stares at the hair that comes away on her fingers.

“Do you,” Akito asks, as the woman goes to leave, “hate having to come do this?”

The maid pauses for a long moment. “I suppose I do,” she says, “though it hardly matters.”

It matters, Akito thinks, as the maid leaves. It matters, because it’s more ammunition against Akito, against Ren, against this entire stupid family and this entire stupid curse. 

“They probably don’t pay you enough,” Akito mumbles, once the door is long closed and she’s alone again. She lays there for longer than she should, but there’s no reason to get up except the fact that the back of her neck is itching, and she’s lived with so many discomforts so long that it doesn’t feel like a good enough reason to force herself to stand.

She does it when the sun starts to set, finally. She pushes herself up and shakes herself, more like a dog than the cat she’s meant to be, and watches the hair fall to the ground. She’ll clean it up later, she supposes. She goes to take a bath, instead, spends too long under the stream of the shower and then drops herself into the bath so hard she descends almost completely under the water.

So much for cats hating water, she thinks, even though it hardly makes sense.

-

The rainy season has been threatening itself, and Akito wakes up to a proper downpour. It saps out all her energy and leaves her listless on the floor. She hasn’t bothered to clean up the hair from the previous day, just messily swept it into a corner with her kimono and then left the fabric in a pile. The maids don’t clean in here. No one wants to set foot in here.

Akito watches the rain blot out any view she had from the window and feels like she’s drowning.

-

“You seem tired,” Shigure said. The little cove they always met in was outdoors, so they had shifted to one the vague safety of one of the trees to try and stay dry. It was a futile battle, and Akito shivered despite the summer heat but refused to go inside.

“It’s the rain,” Hatori said. He appeared when he could, and he’d said he’d felt obligated to come on a day like today, because he just knew they were going to do something stupid. 

Which, Akito supposed, was fair: staying outside in a rainstorm was pretty stupid, given she was sopping wet and was going to have a hard time explaining that one away. 

“Ahh, cats do hate rain, don’t they?” Shigure had said, and Akito had frowned.

“I don’t want you,” Akito had said, “to think of me as the cat, if you think I’m god.”

Shigure had reached up, slide his fingers into her hair and scratched lightly at her scalp in the particular way that made her go boneless against him, body refusing to obey the laws of her skeleton. 

“Can’t it be both?” Shigure asked, and Akito just let out a slightly petulant grunt, because she couldn’t be expected to manage a reply when he was petting her like that.

“Stop bullying her,” Hatori said, and Shigure laughed.

“Do you want me to stop?” he’d asked, and his fingers had stopped moving which just made Akito more aware of how unpleasantly wet she was.

“No!” she’d said, and Hatori had sighed and Shigure had grinned and the fight had been over. 

“I think you’re cute as a cat,” Shigure said, “and you’re beautiful as a god.”

Akito didn’t have a response for that. Didn’t think she’d have a response for it even if he hadn’t been petting her. She didn’t see cute in the mirror, and she certainly didn’t see beautiful. She just saw -- her. The cat. The outcast. The least loved, the least favored. 

She could only believe she was anything else when she was with Shigure. 

He was the only one who could make her feel like there was anything else.

-

It feels like Akito has no energy. She doesn’t eat, which isn’t intentional, but she has no appetite. Everytime she looks at the food she feels her stomach roll in protest, feels something acrid at the back of her throat that makes her hand go to her wrist to curl around the familiar weight of the beads.

She feels sick. The rain is a steady sound, and even when it stops, the air hangs heavy with it, as though even the oxygen she breathes in is damp with it. She hates it. She wants to curl up at someone’s feet and feel their warmth; she wants to be held; she wants affection. She wants a thousand things and she doesn’t even gets as far as making them concrete ideas -- she doesn’t want to be touched by Shigure, she just wants to be _touched_. She doesn’t want to be held by Hatori, she just wants to be _held_. It’s a bone-deep craving and the vague reality of it makes her feel like she doesn’t deserve it in the slightest. 

On the third day of the rain, when the air is so thick Akito feels like she’s breathing in water to drown, the maid reappears.

Akito rolls her head to the side to look at her as she steps in, carefully.

“Are you alright?” she asks.

Akito makes a vague vowel sound that she hopes can be interpreted by humans as an affirmative. 

“You haven’t been eating,” the maid says, “so I tried to make something you might like more. It’s my daughter’s favorites, but if there’s anything you’d like more, I can work on it!”

Akito’s eyes slide over, and she looks at the tray. Carefully, Akito pushes herself up with a hand; her kimono slides off her shoulder, and she doesn’t bother to catch it for a moment until it clicks into her brain that the maid doesn’t _know_ , probably. She drags it back up as she sits up properly, tugging it back into place and trying to brush away the thick humidity with a wave of her hand.

“They let you make it?” Akito asks. It’s nothing special: it’s just curry, but it smells good, and Akito can see the portions of meat and vegetables are more generous than what she usually gets. 

“Well,” the maid says, and leans forward, a little conspiratorially, “I brought the curry roux from home.”

“Don’t,” Akito says, too sudden and too rough, and the maid looks surprised. Akito reaches out, automatically, then curls her hand back and drops it, looking back at the tray. “I mean -- you should listen to them.”

The woman looks surprised at Akito’s outburst, but she smiles a moment later. “Don’t worry,” she says, “this isn’t the first weird job I’ve had!”

Akito just looks at her for a long moment. “Weird,” Akito echoes, faintly. It must seem that way, to someone outside of the curse. She wonders how much the woman knows. The woman doesn’t look at her with disgust or with pity -- what story was she told that’s in-between the truth? 

“I’m sorry,” Akito says, because she knows with absolute certainty that the woman’s friendship is wasted on someone like her. Compassion and kindness -- those are things that aren’t meant for the cat, and Akito has had nineteen years to grow used to that fact. 

“If you’re sorry,” the woman says, “you’ll eat your food.” She gives Akito a wink, then leaves, her golden hair catching the sunlight. 

Akito watches the clouds as they part like the woman herself had parted them, and does her best to eat. She manages half the food; nearly misses the paper folded underneath the bowl when she finds it. Akito sets the tray at the door and hides the paper and wonders if she’ll have the energy to write anything.

-

Akito tries not to remember it, but the rain brings it back.

It was raining then, too, she thinks: she remembers the feel of it, when Ren found her in that courtyard with Shigure and Ayame. Her memory has black spots in it: it’s night in her memory but she knows it was day, like a filter was poorly applied over her world at the time. 

She thought Ren was going to kill her, the hands shaking her shoulders moving to her neck. She remembers Ren screaming at her, but she can’t remember any of the words, not until Shigure had stepped forward, knocked Ren’s arms away and looked her in the eyes. 

“Stop,” Shigure said, standing in front of Akito as she struggled to breathe from the wet ground.

“How dare you,” Ren had said. She still seemed so large to Akito, even then, but it was as Akito looked at Shigure that things had started to equalize in her mind. She’d started to realize that Ren might not be the towering demon she was in Akito’s mind, if it was so easy for Shigure to stand up to her.

“Leave her alone,” Shigure said, firmly.

Ren looked at him, and then she had smiled, slow and wide, and Akito’s vision had faded out. She only remembers the words and the feeling of it: Ren’s voice a careful croon as she said, “You want to save something as disgusting as her?”

Then she’d felt Ren’s hand on her wrist, and then her world had exploded outwards.

Akito had never transformed before. She’d known it was there, of course, she’d known what it _meant_ to be the cat, but she’d never felt it until then. It hurt. It burned. It felt so bad that she couldn’t even scream. Her vision blacked out entirely and then reformed in a haze of orange and purple, the vantage point so different that it made her nauseous. Her limbs were too long and her joints ached and everything was so hot she felt like she might catch fire. Her teeth were too big and her mouth hung open with the weight of them, and she collapsed in spite of herself.

When she was finally able to scream, the voice wasn’t her own. She thought it was the sound of every other cat, of every other person who had borne this curse, screaming out with her.

Ren had recoiled from her, hand pulled up over her nose. Akito had heard people running -- the maids. Ayame. 

Shigure just looked at her, his face blank, and Akito remembers the feeling she’d had when her last bit of hope had died.

_This is it_ , she’d thought, and passed out.

-

Akito eats. She tries, at least; she keeps a note for the maid in her sleeve and passes it to her when she manages to catch her a week later. It doesn’t say much, because Akito doesn’t know what to say, but it’s something: Akito is alright, for whatever that’s worth.

The woman takes the letter with a smile that’s so bright it’s blinding, and Akito worries that it’ll be extinguished like every other good thing in her life.

Akito oscillates wildly between blaming herself for everything that’s ever gone wrong in her life and wanting, desperately, to be allowed to have a single good thing. When she rereads the pages she writes to Shigure, she can see it clearly: some days she writes to him about a future she wishes she could have. Other days she writes only about the darkness, about the things she thinks she deserves and the things that Ren has told her, engrained in on her flesh.

There’s a thousand years and more of hatred seared into Akito’s soul from the curse. She wonders if she would hate herself less, if she wasn’t god _and_ the cat. Wonders if she could tolerate it more. But that only leads her to thinking about futures she’ll never have: if she’d never been born the cat at all. If she’d never been born. 

Would it have been better?

-

Kureno visits. The rain outside is pounding so loudly it gives her a headache, but Kureno manages to get inside the house entirely instead of having to sit outside the bars.

“Akito,” he says, and Akito can’t manage to reply except to roll into him, press her face into his lap and hold on as tightly as she can. He drops a hand to her head, and she can _feel_ the concern so strongly it catches in her chest and alters her heartbeat. “Are you--” 

He cuts off. She’s not alright; that much is obvious. So he pets her head, slowly, drags his nails through her hair the way he knows she likes.

“Are you eating?”

Akito nods against him, because she doesn’t trust her voice otherwise. _Don’t cry, don’t cry_ , she tells herself, because she knows if she starts she might not be able to stop, and she doesn’t want to waste what little time she has with Kureno getting comforted for something as banal as her tears.

“I’ve got something for you,” Kureno says, and he shifts so Akito shifts with him. She manages to push herself up when he withdraws the letter, and Akito’s hands are shaking when she takes them.

“Thank you,” she says. They smell like Shigure’s kimono, and she presses them to her chest for a long moment before she turns. “I have -- some for him.” 

She can pull the tatami mat up on her own, now, and Kureno watches as she withdraws the papers. They’re more of a mess than they were last time, but there’s no judgement in his eyes as she carefully folds them and offers them over. He takes them, tucks them under his shirt so they can’t be so easily seen.

“I’m sorry,” Kureno says, “that I can’t come more often. I wish I could.”

Akito shakes her head. “I know.”

“Shigure-niisan,” Kureno says, softly, “knows everything. He’s going to find a way to change things.”

Akito doesn’t dare hope for it. She doesn’t dare, because she isn’t allowed something as precious as hope, but it’s there in her chest anyway, like a piece of glass she can’t get out. It hurts. 

“Isn’t it better,” Akito says, distress coloring her voice, “for everyone, if I’m here? Isn’t it better if they don’t have to see me?”

“It isn’t,” Kureno answers, so quickly that Akito aches with the honesty of it. He sounds so sure. “None of the other cats were banned from having visitors, and they _did_. You should be allowed to see the ones that love you.”

“None of the other cats,” Akito says, hollowly, “committed the sin of being a false god.”

Kureno reaches up, and his hand is warm against Akito’s cheek and she leans into it. 

“Regardless of what you are,” Kureno says, “there are still people that love you.”

Akito can’t hold herself up under the weight of those words, so she crashes forward into him. She feels it, as always: the swelling of the cat spirit within, the urge to transform, and then the sound of chimes in her mind, like ornaments in the wind, and a tranquility and familiarity. 

Kureno isn’t hers anymore; he doesn’t belong to “god” and he doesn’t belong to the juunishi. She should transform, by all rational logic, but she doesn’t.

“I made a promise,” Kureno says, softly. “I promised you that I would stay with you, no matter what.”

It’s a thrum through her veins. The bond between them wore down so much that it broke, but then Kureno replaced it with something entirely of his own making. Strengthened it with the nights he spent at Akito’s side, the times he comforted her, the times he shielded her from Ren with carefully placed distractions. 

Akito can’t explain a lot of things about the curse, but she knows, with certainty, that Kureno still belongs to her in a way that seems to placate the curse. 

It’s breaking, after all. Just not quickly enough to save any of them.

“You should go,” Akito says, slowly, prying herself backwards. Kureno hesitates for a long moment. He starts to rise, then he stops, shaking his head.

“I’ll stay,” he says, “until you fall back asleep.”

Akito closes her eyes and sighs, because she doesn’t have the strength to resist that kind of an offer and he knows it. He lays down on the futon with her, pulls the thin summer blanket over her and holds her until she falls asleep, deep enough that she doesn’t wake up when he leaves.

-

Akito dreams:

“This is permanence,” she says, and her hands are in soft fur, a warm up-down motion of life as the cat breathes. “This is predestined.”

“This is unnatural,” the cat tells her, and the fur goes cold.

“No,” she says. “No. I’ll meet with you again.”

She falls backwards, through a thousand lives, the memories fleeting and yearning, and she wonders why none of them feel the way she wants them to.

-

Akito wakes up. The rainy season is ending, and it should be easier for her to think, but it isn’t: the sun seems to have no difference, now. She wonders what that means.

“I heard you had a visitor,” Ren says, calmly, and Akito opens her eyes to stare at the wall. She should sit up; she should give Ren her attention. It only makes her more mad to be ignored, but Akito can’t manage it. She can’t muster the strength in her limbs.

Akito doesn’t respond.

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” Ren asks, her voice deceptively sweet, and Akito closes her eyes. 

_Please don’t have hurt Kureno,_ Akito thinks, and forces herself upright. 

“It isn’t,” Akito says, weakly, “like that.” 

“Come here,” Ren says. Akito looks at her and feels the panic rise in her veins, but what is she supposed to _do_? She hesitates, and Ren’s smile drops. Akito stands before the mood can drop further, and Ren reaches through the bars, lets her fingers drag across Akito’s cheek and then fist savagely into her hair. Akito doesn’t scream when Ren slams her head against the metal, just lets out a gasp, tries to scrabble at the bars until she can keep herself upright. 

“Why are you in here?” Ren demands.

“Because,” Akito says, the answer written so deep into her that she doesn’t even have to think about, “I’m a monster.”

“You’re disgusting,” Ren says. “A monster that killed his own father. Do you want me to die, too? Is that it?”

“No,” Akito says, and thinks, _yes_. She thinks she’s bleeding; her forehead feels wet where it’s pressed against the rough surface of the bar. 

“Then you must want to suffer,” Ren says, breathes it out like it’s Akito’s own idea. “Do you think you can atone for what you’ve done?”

“No--” Akito starts, and Ren strikes again; Akito’s vision greys out at the edges, but Ren lets go of her after it, lets Akito crumple to a heap on the floor. 

“You’ll contaminate everything you touch,” Ren says, “whether it’s Akira-san or a maid.”

And like that: Akito _knows_. She knows, with certainty and with entirety, what Ren is talking about, and she squeezes her eyes shut against the pain, against the aching of her head and the guilt in her chest that feels like smothering her.

“I’m sorry,” Akito says, because there’s nothing else she can do.

“I erased you,” Ren says, “from her memory. She’ll be relieved of her duty, so you won’t have anymore visitors. You’re not allowed them.”

“I’m sorry,” Akito says, but it isn’t to Ren: it’s to the maid; it’s to Hatori; it’s to Akira. It’s to Shigure from afar, who she won’t be able to write to; it’s to all the people she’s failed by doing nothing. 

“All you do,” Ren says, her voice taking on a life of its own in its anger, “is cause people to suffer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Akira-san,” Ren says, her voice drifting. Akito watches her turn; stares at her feet and tries not to think at all. “I knew I should have gotten rid of a mistake like this before it could hurt you.”

Akito’s mouth moves, but she isn’t sure she gives any volume to the apology this time.

-

Hatori doesn’t come for her. Akito realizes it halfway through the night when she’s still laying there, the blood on her head flaking off whenever she moves.

“Ah,” Akito says, and forces herself back upright. The world swims in front of her for a moment, rearranging itself like she’s underwater, and then it stabilizes well enough. If she pretends that the edges aren’t overtaken by static, it’s normal. She tries to get to her feet and crashes back down, so she stays on her knees to get to the bathroom. 

She doesn’t have much in the way of things to help herself, and she doesn’t have much in the way of energy, either, so she just rinses herself in water as hot as it’ll go and then presses a clean kimono to her head as a makeshift bandage, the cotton heavy against her skin. She passes back out on the bathroom floor, and it takes several more hours until she manages to get the rest of the way up, to clothe herself well enough to go back to her normal spot.

She collapses onto the tatami. She tries to read one of Shigure’s letters again, briefly, but the words keep moving and she finally gives it up. She’s memorized them anyway, builds the letters up in her mind until she can hear his voice.

“I hate,” Akito says, to the empty room, “this. I hate this.”

-

Akito had only ever transformed into her true form once, but it was enough. Enough for the maids to avoid her more than usual; enough for her mother to ignore her for half a year, to live in a different area of the house entirely.

“Because of that wretched smell,” Ren had said, and Akito had stared down at her hands.

Then Shigure found her again. 

“How did you,” Akito blurted. She reached out to touch Shigure, sitting there on her engawa, but he was solid and warm and didn’t flinch from her. He reached up to take her hands in his.

“One of the maids really likes dogs,” Shigure said, with a shrug of his shoulder and a smile on his face, like nothing had happened.

“But,” Akito said, “you saw-- you saw--”

“I wanted to see you again,” Shigure said, and Akito had swayed on her feet with the weight of it. Shigure had reached out, and she’d crumpled in against him, let herself get lost in that feeling of someone’s embrace where she wouldn’t transform, where she wouldn’t worry.

“I missed you,” Akito blurted, without thinking. She couldn’t think around him. It felt like he was so hard to touch, but he was right there in front of her. He was right there.

“I’ll always find a way to get to you,” Shigure had said. “You’re usually alone here, right?”

Akito nodded. “Meals-- and sometimes they’ll talk about school. The maids.”

“Is it lonely?” Shigure asked. “Are you lonely, Akito-san?”

Akito had stared at him and wondered, because she’d never really understood it. The ache in her chest when she was alone, the knowledge that she shouldn’t be. That she wouldn’t be, if things had only been a little different.

Akito had cried, instead of answering, and Shigure had held her against him, lifted her into his arms like she was nothing and let her cry until she couldn’t cry anymore.

“I’ll come back,” Shigure had said. 

And he had.

He always had.

-

Akito wonders if it would have been better if she’d never met Shigure. If she’d never known what she was missing, she couldn’t have missed it. If she didn’t know what it felt like, would it be easier to bear? The idea of being alone seems so inconsequential. So what if she’s locked up? She has food, she has water. She has herself.

Why was it so intolerable? Shouldn’t she be used to it? 

She’d had books as a child; she’d had the radio, she’d had things to get lost into. Now she’s limited to her own mind. It’s an escape, but it’s a dark one: the wound on her head heals slowly without medical care, and as it scabs over she feels something inside of her twist in retaliation.

The natto is back in her meals.

Akito doesn’t eat it. 

The headache lessens; the screaming inside of her mind doesn’t. She wonders if there’s an excuse for it, if she can really say she deserves anything. Even assuming that pain is what she deserves feels presumptive, at this point, and every line of thinking leads her into a maze she can’t find her way out of.

She hears the door open, and glances over. 

There’s a tray of food there, but the door closes before she can even see the face of the person who delivered it.

“I’m tired,” Akito says, to the empty room. 

She doesn’t sleep.


	6. Chapter 6

If Hatori Sohma was anyone else, he would have lost his mind. As it is, he can feel the stress in his body, and so he sets his pencil down and forces himself to stretch, to take a break. The mind can’t function if he spends all his time working, and it’s late enough that he should start winding down, no matter how endless the charting seems. The gap between his father's tenure and his own means that Hatori is looking at twice the work to correct all the substitute doctors that the inner family had to settle for. They're all perfectly good doctors with perfectly good charts, but they aren't members of the juunishi, and so he has to redo the work while still obeying the demands on his body.

For all that he knows about how to keep someone healthy, he isn’t always the best at following those rules, he thinks, as he taps out a cigarette and steps outside to light it. 

“Long night?” 

Hatori inclines his head to look at Yuki, who presents himself casually. 

“You shouldn’t be up,” Hatori says, knowing it’s true for both of them. Yuki shrugs a shoulder up with a small half-smile.

“I’m not a morning person anyway,” Yuki offers. 

Hatori doesn’t bother to mention the fact that Yuki has parents that should be watching over him -- they clearly aren’t, and it isn’t a fight he feels like having, if he’s being honest, so he just nods at the engawa.

“Sit upwind of the smoke,” Hatori says, and Yuki does. 

Hatori doesn’t try to fill the silence. He’s a doctor -- officially, now, aside from some extra certifications that mean he still has to cram some extra knowledge into his brain to deal with some of the stranger ailments of the family -- but that isn’t what he is to the juunishi, first and foremost. Even Yuki, who has been in his office at least as often as Rin and who has every right to see him as an annoying presence seems to seek him out, sometimes.

Hatori takes some solace in the knowledge that he’s well-regarded, even if it makes him feel a bit guilty at the end of the day.

“Nii-san said you were getting an assistant,” Yuki says, after Hatori’s cigarette has already been stubbed out. 

“She’s interning somewhere else,” Hatori replies. Kana had seemed perfectly nice, but Hatori hadn’t felt like trying to justify her presence -- not when Ren was already so volatile about things. Kana had deflated, but Hatori had gotten her a job with considerably more prestige, and she’d accepted the excuse, in the end. 

Yuki’s quiet for another long moment. He looks at Hatori, carefully, and Hatori looks back.

“It isn’t,” Yuki says, “supposed to be like this, is it?” 

Hatori doesn’t reply.

“I know the curse is unchanging,” Yuki says. “I know that means that we’re all bound together. But we aren’t allowed to leave, or to meet anyone… It wasn’t always like this, was it?”

“No,” Hatori says. “It wasn’t.”

He can remember: being a child. His parents raised him and loved him, even if they weren’t home much, and he’d been allowed his own freedoms. Ren’s rule over the family had closed like an iron fist after Akira died, and the family had been steadily splintering since then.

There was nowhere for the juunishi to run, of course. Not as long as Ren had “god” locked away.

“Is it because,” Yuki says, and then trails off, unwilling to say it.

“What you need to worry about,” Hatori says, “is not getting sick while you’re in school.”

Yuki looks at Hatori, and then offers him a smile, sad and slow. “I wanted to go somewhere else for school,” he says, “but it was denied.”

Hatori doesn’t sigh, but he wants to. “I’ll see what I can do,” Hatori says, finally, knowing that he’s overextending himself. There’s only so much he can do, only so much that’s within his power, but he wants to do more. To secure a future for Yuki, for Rin, for all of them. A future he couldn’t secure for Akito.

“Don’t worry about me,” Yuki says, a little too firmly. There’s a spark of Ayame in his eyes, and Hatori has the distinct impression that they’ve been in contact more than anyone else has been aware of. It's dangerous, given that Ayame is one of Ren's least favorites of an already hated bunch, but if it brings life to Yuki's eyes then Hatori will continue to look the other way. “I’ve still got some time to figure it out.”

Hatori reaches out; ruffles against Yuki’s head, and Yuki smiles. “Then don’t get sick,” Hatori tells him.

Yuki falls asleep on Hatori’s office couch, which Hatori should do something about and doesn’t. Hatori tucks him in and sets an alarm for him, half an hour before Yuki needs to get up, and then goes home to stare at his ceiling until his own alarm goes off.

-

Hatori gets called to see Ren, and when he gets there her room is an absolute disaster. He steels himself as he steps inside, and Ren whirls on him, a fire in her eyes as she grabs onto the lapels of his suit.

“Hatori,” she says. 

“Are you unwell?” Hatori asks.

“Yes -- yes, I’m doing terribly,” Ren says. She drops her hands, turns on her heels like she’s distracted. “I need you to erase someone’s memories.”

Hatori doesn’t allow himself to react. There's demons that he can't see and voices that he can't hear, and so he only has one half of the conversation. It's better to wait than to try and get involved in the middle of one of Ren's fits. 

“She found out about that _thing_ \-- she tried to _befriend_ it,” Ren says, and her voice is shaking with rage, her hands shaking with the purity of it as it rushes through her. Ren has no inhibitions to hold her back; there is nothing she fears except what has already happened, the continued distance between her and a dead man.

She should never have been given power.

“I’ll fire her,” Ren says. “I’ll fire her, so erase that thing from her memory.”

There’s nothing Hatori can do to prevent the situation if it's already occurred. “Of course,” he says. Ren’s fingers flutter, but there’s nothing left for her to throw, nothing left for her to harm. 

“Don’t come back until it’s done,” Ren says, and Hatori excuses himself.

-

Hatori picks his battles, and this fight isn’t one of them. He’s had to erase memories on Ren’s orders more than he wants to admit, for reasons that were so frivolous he can’t believe they were even up for consideration.

He doesn’t fight this. He meets the maid in a private room, and she offers him a smile. 

“You’re the one they sent to fire me, huh?” she says, conversationally, like it’s a totally normal thing. 

“Yes,” Hatori lies. “You’re being let go.”

“Well, I expected that,” the woman says.

Hatori hedges his bets, and then -- because her mind is going to be erased anyway -- offers: “You worked your way inside quickly.”

“I said I’d sign my name in blood or whatever they needed,” the woman offers, with a careless roll of her shoulder. “It was a nice raise, you know? They made it sound like it was terrible, to have to help the kid out.”

“You’d sign your name in…” Hatori repeats, a little incredulously, and then shakes his head. He hasn’t heard anyone refer to Akito as “the kid” in a long, long time, and never in that fond voice that the woman used.

“Hey,” the woman says. “I’m not stupid.”

Hatori looks at her, levelly.

“I know you’re keeping the kid locked up,” she says, “and I think it’s gotta be for a pretty stupid reason, even if everyone acts like it’s the end of the world. Why don’t you just get rid of her?”

“What?” Hatori asks, and this time he’s outright incredulous.

“Let me take her,” the woman says. 

“She’s dangerous,” Hatori says, the lie automatic.

“Bullshit,” the woman replies, letting out a rude snort with the words. “I bet she’s the kind of kid that butterflies land on. She coulda broken out of that place anytime if she wanted.”

Hatori has no idea what that means. He wishes she _could_ take Akito, frankly: living outside would be a much better option than what’s inside, but the Sohma family still has too much sway. Locking up a relative because they’re “dangerous” is objectionable in modern society, but no one would ever dream of trying to interfere in Sohma affairs even if anyone knew.

“It’s bigger than that, huh?” the woman says.

“Yes,” Hatori answers, automatically. When he raises his hand, the woman leans back for a moment before she seems to understand, and he puts a hand on her forehead.

“Take care of her,” the woman says. “Or I’m gonna break back in and break her out.”

“I will,” Hatori says, but the promise rings hollow as the woman falls backwards, unconscious from the sudden feeling of her mind rewriting itself to erase the memories. One of the other maids watches from the door, and Hatori stands, slowly.

“She’ll think she was only helping with the normal chores,” Hatori says. “Give her a good reference somewhere else.”

The maid nods, and then several of them help lift the woman, dazed, to her feet.

Hatori watches them go and then looks in the direction of the isolation room for a long moment before he goes home.

-

Hatori had been a child when Ren had first demanded it. To erase a memory too precious for him to even conceive of. 

He’d said no, of course, and his parents had borne the brunt of it for him. He wonders if Ren’s retaliation isn’t partially to blame for his father’s young death, but he refuses to pull the records to find out. There’s nothing to be gained from the knowledge except anger. 

In the end, though: he hadn’t had to erase Shigure’s memory of Akito, which was all that had mattered. Ren’s rage had been enormous and all-consuming, and Hatori thinks that’s when things had really started to go off the rails as she put a moratorium on anything she didn’t directly approve of. No one could leave. No one could enter. No one could change in the slightest so long as Akito was alive and so long as any of the juunishi revered her. 

So long as Shigure loved her.

Ren’s never asked again, and it’s for the best, because the older Hatori gets the more he realizes his powers don’t stand a chance against whatever it is that Shigure feels. It’s so deep that Hatori can’t relate. He’s never felt a love like that. He doesn’t think he’ll ever feel a love like that.

For someone like him, it’s unnecessary.

-

Hatori breaks out the good whiskey, because the situation calls for it. He doesn’t get drunk, because he’s always on-call, but he drinks enough to take the edge off his guilt, and that’s enough for him to at least focus on reading.

There’s a knock on the door, and he shifts over to open it, to look down at the small figure of Momiji on his doorstep.

“Hi,” Momiji says.

“It’s late,” Hatori says, and steps aside to let Momiji in. Momiji steps in, easily, hands behind his back, and spins once he’s safely inside. 

“That’s why I came!” Momiji chirps. That brightness doesn’t last long: once the door is closed, Momiji scratches at his cheek, looking away from Hatori and focusing unseeingly on the bookcase. 

“Were you having nightmares again?” Hatori asks. He sits back down, and Momiji follows, wiggling closer to him. Momiji sniffs Hatori’s glass and then immediately makes a face, and Hatori thinks that at least he doesn’t have to worry about any of the kids following in his dubious coping mechanisms.

“No,” Momiji says. “I didn’t get as far as nightmares. Can I stay here for the night?”

Not for the first time in his life, Hatori wonders how he’s managed to become the parent-slash-older-brother of so many members of the juunishi. The burden of being the oldest, he supposes. Karma for all the things he isn’t able to do, maybe. 

“Yes,” Hatori says, and Momiji shoots him a bright smile. It isn’t the first time Momiji has sought him out, and Hatori doesn’t think it’ll be the last. In the same way that so many of them hover around Shigure, they orbit around Hatori, too. He imagines they’d be around Akito and Kureno, too, if they were allowed, and the only thing stopping them from being around Ayame is that Ayame has a somewhat respectable business to run and is therefore rarely at the main house.

“Whatcha reading?” Momiji asks, leaning into Hatori’s arm. 

“A novel about parallel realities,” Hatori says.

“Is it any good?” 

“I haven’t finished it,” Hatori says.

Momiji grins up at him. “You can know before a book is finished if you like it or not! You can know right away, so you can read things that you like the most.”

“I think this one has potential,” Hatori says. He doesn’t offer to read it to Momiji, and Momiji doesn’t request it -- as young as Momiji acts, he’s closer to adulthood than anyone wants to admit -- but Momiji does wriggle until he’s pressed against Hatori and can reach out to follow the lines in the book. 

“What’s this kanji?” Momiji asks. 

“Depression,” Hatori says, automatically. 

“Ohh,” Momiji says, and then mumbles what Hatori assumes is the accompanying German word for the concept. Momiji’s reading speed is significantly slower than Hatori’s -- particularly given the choice of book is far from near his level -- but Hatori patiently waits to turn the page until Momiji’s finger reaches the end.

“Hari,” Momiji says, when he seems to realize Hatori’s mind is wandering. “Do you ever think about leaving?”

Hatori doesn’t answer right away, and Momiji continues, like he’s desperate to fill the silence.

“Mama and Papa and Momo -- they could go back to Germany, if they wanted. But I wouldn’t be able to go with them,” Momiji says. 

“Whether it makes it better or worse,” Hatori says, “they would need a good reason to go.”

Momiji looks at Hatori with a look that’s far too mature for his age. “Papa is a CEO, Hari,” he says, “they could _definitely_ , definitely, get a good reason to move.”

Hatori doesn’t ask if they’re considering it. He doesn’t want to know anything that incriminating. 

“If they did, I’d be alone,” Momiji says. Hatori opens his mouth to say some sort of platitude, but Momiji continues before he can. “I thought of how lonely it would be if I couldn’t see them at all, and then I thought how lonely it must be for you.”

“I get to see you,” Hatori says. “It isn’t as though I’m alone.”

“I know it’s different for us,” Momiji says, softly. “I know that we have each other, even if we don’t have anyone else. Is it… wrong if that isn’t enough?”

Hatori wants to say yes, out of instinct. He doesn’t. He quiets that part of him, sets the dragon to sleep. 

“It isn’t wrong,” Hatori says, carefully. He’s too young to be having these kinds of conversations. He’s too old to carry this much weight.

“Then I thought,” Momiji says, “how hard it must be for _him_.”

“You can’t see him,” Hatori says, because his blood runs cold at the idea of the things Ren would do to someone as bright as Momiji. 

“I won’t,” Momiji says, and when he looks at Hatori his eyes are earnest and pleading. “Do you visit him?”

“Yes,” Hatori says. “Not often enough, but as often as I can.”

Momiji accepts this. “Even the cat,” Momiji says, raising his hand, “must want to have more than what we’re allowed.”

Momiji falls quiet, after that; he follows along in the book for awhile longer before he falls asleep on Hatori, his hand dropping and his breathing evening out. He doesn’t stir even when Hatori moves him to the spare futon, drapes a blanket over him. Momiji curls his stuffed rabbit underneath his head and looks peaceful, for the moment.

Hatori finds no such solace in sleep.

-

Hatori’s life returns to relative normalcy, after the maid is fired and the Sohma estate creaks back into the familiarity of a broken system. He fills his time with patients and charts and a dazzling array of mundane medical problems that require very little thought.

Ayame visits.

“I thought I’d ask you out for tea, but then I considered that might be too much trouble for you,” Ayame says, crossing his long legs on Hatori’s couch. He looks out of place: his coat is bright purple, his hair as long and flowing as ever, and he stands out against the rust brown of the couch and the deep mahogany of the table. “I know how busy you are, these days.”

“That’s…. considerate,” Hatori says, because he doesn’t want to insult Ayame, but there are two people in the room who are aware of Ayame’s character flaws. It can go unsaid.

Ayame waves a hand. “I _do_ try,” Ayame says. He makes a little motion with his hand that Hatori can’t begin to understand. “Sometimes, I’ll think to myself, ‘What would Tori-san do?’ and allow it to guide my actions! Of course, I couldn’t dream of being anywhere near the kind of person you are.”

“I’m really not that good of a person,” Hatori says, dryly, but in truth he’s glad that Ayame is trying. Ayame is growing from that boy who was so oblivious to the feelings of others around him, and it makes him hopeful for the rest of them.

“All the best people think that,” Ayame says, with a sniff and a wave of his hand as though he can simply brush the protest aside. Maybe he can. Maybe it really is that easy for him. “At any rate, I’ve come with an ulterior motive.”

Hatori looks at Ayame and does not give in to the leading statement. 

“If you won’t ask, then I shall simply tell you! I’ve been recruited into Gure-san’s torrid love affair,” Ayame says, “greatly endangering myself in the process! Here are some letters for Akito-san, when next you manage to see her.”

The stack is thicker than usual, this time, and Hatori takes them and wonders how he’s going to smuggle them in. Under his shirt, maybe, with his jacket over it, or in the bottom of his bag… he’ll figure it out.

“‘Torrid’?” Hatori quotes.

“Passionate, but from afar,” Ayame explains. “There’s a secondary reason for my visit, however.” Ayame stops there, which is unusual: he takes a sip of the tea. It’s mediocre, because Hatori made it without the assistance of the maids -- Hatori knows better than to allow any prying ears around when people like Ayame and Shigure are over -- but Ayame doesn’t complain. “I intend to take Yuki-kun in for high school.”

Hatori lets out a breath as he rolls the idea over in his mind.

“To live with you, at the shop?” Hatori asks.

“Yes,” Ayame answers. “There will have to be some rearranging to accommodate him, but it’s closer to the school he wants to go to.”

“You’re not the sort to take no for an answer,” Hatori muses.

“Quite right, Tori-san!” Ayame agrees, even though it wasn’t entirely a compliment. “In the same way that I didn’t allow myself to be stopped from moving out, I won’t allow them to stop me from removing Yuki. I was incapable of taking him anywhere the first time around, and I believe he still holds it against me.”

“I think he’s forgiven you,” Hatori says, but he knows it’s only because Yuki has been so desperately lonely that Ayame’s presence was valued despite all his complaints to the contrary. “You were about the age he is now, weren’t you?”

“Give or take,” Ayame says. “I brushed him off cruelly, then, but it was only a sign of my own inadequacies. He hasn’t sent me away, at any rate, and he’s amicable to the idea of moving in.”

Hatori thinks this is a good move for the both of them and a terrible move for everyone else, because Ren is going to go absolutely nuclear if someone as important as the rat moves off the estate. He won’t move to stop it, though, not anymore than he’ll move to aid it. As often as Shigure calls himself useless, Hatori thinks that at least Shigure has that strong sort of passion to move him to action, when it’s required. 

Hatori exists on a fine line, and seems incapable of doing more than that. 

“I’ll do what I can,” Hatori says, finally. “I can clear him medically, at least.”

“That’s more than helpful,” Ayame says, and he sounds so genuinely grateful that Hatori can’t help but smile. For someone so unaware of other people’s emotions, Ayame seems to feel everything so deeply. He might feel them more deeply, given that both Hatori and Shigure seem stunted in their own ways. 

Truthfully, Hatori doesn’t know which of them has it the worst, but he supposes it’s a terrible contest to win or lose.

“It’s something,” Hatori agrees.

-

Hatori can get away with a lot, because Ren trusts him. Other than Kureno, Hatori is likely the most favored of the juunishi, and he’ll use that to his advantage to see Akito periodically. It takes him another couple days, but he manages to justify a reason to see her, checking in on her base levels of vitamins and anemia. No one tells him not to, and he leaves her medical file on his desk for plausibility reasons.

He rehearses what he can say in his head as he goes to the isolation room. Every single speech flies out of his head immediately when he sees Akito.

For a split second he thinks she’s dead. She’s on the ground and prone, her limbs listless around her and her eyes open and staring at nothing. For a long second, nothing happens; Hatori’s heart beats so loudly in his chest he thinks he might die too if she’s dead.

Then she moves. Not much. Tilts her head slightly to look at him. She’s paler than usual, gaunt and deathly thin, and Hatori steps over to her too quickly. 

“What happened?” Hatori asks.

Akito blinks, slowly. There’s a wound on her head, a deep scrape that’s infected, and the bruising goes back past her hairline.

“I think,” she says, “I have a concussion. Had, maybe.”

“How long ago?” Hatori asks. 

“Mom fired someone,” Akito says. Her voice is hoarse, and she’s cold when Hatori lifts her. She moves like she’s made of paper: there’s nothing to her. 

“That was several days ago,” Hatori says. 

“Oh,” Akito says, distantly. Hatori is worried, but he doesn’t show it, doesn’t allow himself to show it for the sake of this girl. 

“You haven’t been eating?” It’s barely a question: he can tell by looking at her that she hasn’t, and it isn’t as though Akito ever had much weight to spare.

“I guess not,” Akito says, her voice faint. She lets her eyes go to the door, and there’s a full tray of food there from when her last meal was delivered. “I lost track of time.”

Internally, Hatori can tell himself exactly what’s happening. Psychologically, physically. Akito is responding to trauma by dissociating. Humans do poorly without socialization and stimulation, and even worse when they’re suffering from the kind of abuse that Akito has been through. The concussion hasn’t helped matters: she hisses when he presses at the wound, which must have looked even worse when it happened initially.

When Hatori wasn’t there.

“I’m sorry,” Hatori says. 

“There's a lot of that going around,” Akito says, dryly. She’s heavy in Hatori’s hands. She doesn’t help as much as he tends to the wound. There isn’t much to do, with it being so many days later, but he sterilizes it, applies antibiotics to make sure it doesn’t get worse. 

“Did you erase her memory?” Akito asks, after a long silence punctuated only by the sound of Hatori ripping open a gauze pad.

Hatori doesn’t hesitate. “Yes,” he says. He knows Akito won’t hate him for it, because her anger is only ever a temporary, torrential affair, but she doesn’t even seem to have the energy for that. She just looks down. 

“She had a daughter,” Akito says.

“I’ve instructed them to give her a good reference,” Hatori says, “so she shouldn’t be out of a job long.”

Hatori doesn’t know if that was the worry or not, but Akito falls quiet at it. Hatori grabs out some basic painkillers, starts to give Akito the bottle and then hesitates. 

“How bad has the pain been?” Hatori asks.

“I just,” Akito says, “try to sleep through it.”

“Take these,” Hatori says, and Akito opens her mouth obediently, lets him put a dose on her tongue like she’s still a child. “I’m leaving you two more doses, if you need them.” Not enough to do any damage even if she wants to, in the worst case scenario. Hatori hates thinking of it as a possibility, because it makes his soul ache, the spirit inside of him demanding that he do something. Anything.

Akito swallows the pills without complaint and without water, but her gaze is still unfocused afterwards. Hatori isn’t sure how much to blame on the concussion. 

“Akito,” Hatori says, and her gaze drifts back to him. Her pupils are the same size; they’re reacting properly to light. “What are you thinking?”

Akito is quiet for a long moment. “I’m not thinking,” she says. “I don’t want to think about anything. I just want this to be over.”

As a doctor, the words make Hatori’s skin crawl; as a cursed -- as Akito’s friend -- it makes him sick with worry.

“I have letters for you from Shigure,” Hatori says, and it’s the first thing that seems to get a genuine emotional reaction out of her. A little bit of her spark reignites, and she shifts of her own volition. “I’ll give them to you if you promise to eat.”

Akito is quiet for a long moment. “I’ll try,” she says. She doesn’t lie to Hatori, not even when it might serve her better, and that’s almost as upsetting as the sight of her nearly giving up. “I don’t like the food.”

“I know,” Hatori says. “At least drink the soup.” It isn’t enough. He’ll see if he can’t get them to give her something he knows she’ll eat alongside it, something calorically dense. He’s not above writing a prescription for potato chips, at this point. 

Hatori pulls the letters out of his bag and Akito takes them. He watches as she focuses, shakes her head a little, and then frowns, but she seems able to read them after a moment’s delay. 

“Is it hard to read them?” 

“His handwriting’s just shit,” Akito mumbles, which isn’t entirely true, but he’ll let her say it. She pauses after a moment, looking up at Hatori. “How long can you stay?” 

Hatori gets the distinct impression that Akito is being forced to weigh two of her favorite people against each other, and so he opens his arms, lets her crawl into them, the papers crinkling in her hand. 

“I’ll stay while you read,” Hatori says, and Akito accepts this. She makes it through half the lengthy stack before her eyelids droop, and she falls asleep in Hatori’s arms the same way she did when she was younger. He watches her for a long moment, then brushes her hair back from her face, drops a careful kiss onto the top of her head. 

“It won’t be much longer,” Hatori promises her, even though she can’t hear him. She’s too thin and too tired, and he tucks her into her futon and tucks the letters under the tatami mat she’d shown him. 

Hatori has to believe that Shigure will succeed, because the alternative is seeing Akito and everyone else completely broken. He doesn’t know if he’d make it through that.

He doesn’t want to find out.

**Author's Note:**

> hello and welcome to another slowburn with rei! i'm writing this one for nanowrimo, so updates should be pretty steady! strap in as i wildly change the way the curse works, ruin some people's lives, help some other people's lives from being ruined, and write 50,000+ of akito sohma's life being terrible!
> 
> you can find me on twitter @warsfeils for more updates, screaming about akito, and so on and so forth.


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